The Collects of the Roman Missals: A Comparative Study of the Sundays in Proper Seasons before and after the Second Vatican Council by Lauren Pristas (review)

Antiphon 18.1 (2014) 106–109 Book Review 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 Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy , Sacrosanctum Concilium. Beginning with the First Sunday of 107 Book review 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 researcher’s 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 season’s “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...