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Lauren Pristas

The Collects of the Roman Missals:


A Comparative Study of the Sundays in Proper Seasons
before and after the Second Vatican Council
T&T Clark Studies in Fundamental Liturgy Series
New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013
xiv + 250 pages. Paperback. $49.95.

Critical studies of the post-Vatican II liturgical reform are in many cases old news, the
sort of thing that has been brought up since the Ottaviani Intervention. But Lauren
Pristas, a professor of theology at Caldwell College in New Jersey, has made it her
business over the last decade to look more deeply than most other scholars at the original
Latin texts of the revised Roman Rite liturgy. Specifically, she has undertaken a non-
polemical study of the theological principles and policies of revision that underpin the
propers of the Mass. Her monograph, The Collects of the Roman Missals, which culls and
augments her previous research, is a comparative study of the collects assigned to the
Sundays and major feasts of proper seasons in the missal of 1962 (the last of the
Tridentine missals) and the missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970 (or, in its most
recent typical edition, 2002). Its objective is threefold: to determine whether the pre- and
post-Vatican II missals emphasize the same truths of faith and the same aspects of
Christian life, whether Catholics who worship by means of the revised rites are shaped by
their worship in the same way that earlier generations were shaped by theirs, and if the
answer to either of the preceding questions is no, to determine the nature and significance
of the differences (1).
The book consists of eight chapters (Introduction and Background; Resources;
Advent; Christmas; Septuagesima; Lent; Paschaltide; Summary and Conclusion), an
extensive bibliography and three indices: prayers, Scripture citations, and general.
Drawing on published and archive material, Pristas presents the relevant discussions and
decisions of the Consilium, the body charged with revising the liturgical books according
to the prescriptions of the Second Vatican Councils Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,
Sacrosanctum Concilium. Beginning with the First Sunday of Advent and ending with
Pentecost Sunday, she carefully examines the Latin collects of the two missals in relation
both to each other and to their respective source texts a researchers nightmare, given
that the Consilium eliminated or relocated many of the old orations and removed many of
the features of the traditional Proper of the Seasons (gone are the Ember Days, the season
of Septuagesima, Passiontide and, while not pertinent to the present study nonetheless
noteworthy, the Octave of Pentecost). We need not wait for Christmas to arrive before we
find that the 1970 missal introduced significant changes of theological emphasis and
spiritual outlook. For example, the 1962 Advent Sunday collects express the absolute
necessity of grace for every salutary act unambiguously in the somewhat subtle, non-
expository manner proper to orations, whereas the new prayers, while not explicitly
contradicting Catholic teaching on grace, invite misunderstanding because they neither
articulate it nor, more worrisomely, seem to assume it (59). The traditional Advent
collects, moreover, rest upon the logical assumption or, more accurately, the firm belief
that divine assistance is the actual presence of Christ (61); by contrast, the new collects
seek goods which do not reduce, as it were, to the simple presence of Christ or of God
himself and consequently portray God as standing further off and acting toward us in a
less personal and more extrinsic manner (61-62).
More striking was the complete overhaul of the corpus of Lenten collects. In the
Tridentine missals these prayers emphasize the interdependence between body and soul
and of the necessity of both divine grace and graced human effort (154). The revisers
rephrased or replaced all of these collects, except the one for Palm Sunday, by texts
which are materially quite different (127). It might be claimed that Sacrosanctum
Concilium no. 109, which directs that the seasons twofold character (penitential and
pre-baptismal) be given greater prominence in the liturgy, justifies a revision of the
Lenten formularies; but that makes all the more surprising the absence of the
baptismal elements from all of the new Lenten Sunday collects and of the penitential
elements from most of them (155).
As Pristas amply documents, the majority of the proper season collects in the Missal
of Paul VI were not simply taken from ancient sacramentaries or the more proximate
source of the 1962 missal, but instead were patched together from various biblical,
patristic and liturgical texts, in a practice known as centonization. Some of them are
entirely new compositions. In many instances, the prayers were modified to correspond
either to present-day customs and discipline (instituta) or to perceived modern
sensibilities. For example, once the strict Lenten fast was relaxed in 1966, it would have
been disingenuous to continue to pray collects that took for granted that every weekday
of Lent was a day of fasting. More troubling to this reviewer was the systematic removal
or editing of prayers deemed too negative or jarring to contemporary man (the gravity of
sin, reparation, eternal punishment, etc.) and their replacement by texts which, at least in
some respects, breathe the shallow optimism of the 1960s. Pristas is not the first scholar
to document this. Father Anthony Cekadas more polemical study of the doctrinal content
of the new Mass propers, organized topically and published in 1991, cites several of the
same sources as does Pristas and yields the same conclusions, though on a much smaller
scale. Curiously, Pristas makes no mention of it.
As for what these and other painstakingly substantiated differences signify about the
post-Vatican II missal as a whole, Pristas is cautious. It remains to be shown (in a
subsequent volume?) whether these changes in emphasis are offset by the revisions in
other parts of the missal (228), specifically, the collects assigned to the per annum
Sundays. Nevertheless, she has already supplied abundant data for answering the
questions which prompted this study.
Pristas rightly acknowledges in her conclusion that the same Paschal Mystery is
expressed and actualized in very different, but by no means contrary, ways in the Mass of
the Roman Rite and in the Divine Liturgy of the Byzantine Rite, and yet both of them
have their place in the Catholic Church. Let us suppose, then, that the Missal of Paul VI
expresses the same lex credendi as its Tridentine antecedents, albeit with different
theological accents. Even so, from a strictly liturgical perspective the validity of the
notion that there is one Roman Rite in two forms depends on the substantial continuity of
the revised liturgy with received tradition. In The Restoration and Organic Development
of the Roman Rite, published in 2010 as part of the same series as the present volume,
Lszl Dobszay states that the Roman Rite is incarnated more in the Propers than in the
Order of Mass (48), for the sacramentary is the most Roman component of the classical
Roman Rite (201). Many of the prayers in the 1970 missal are very ancient in origin,
either in whole or in some of the parts recycled. The fact remains, however, that the
Consilium used those older texts more often to replace and rearrange the existing
euchological material rather than enrich and augment it. Pristass meticulous research
makes a very useful contribution to the history of liturgical development after the
Council. Taken together with the findings of other recent scholarship, it also makes an
important contribution to the question of the necessity of reforming the liturgical reform.

THOMAS M. KOCIK
ST ANNES PARISH
FALL RIVER, MASSACHUSETTS

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