By using quantitative analysis as a tool, this article first establishes the extent to which the 1970 missal includes the Sunday and Holy Day collects of the 1962 missal, incorporates collects drawn from other Mass books,3 and introduces collects that are new. The quantitative analysis finds that the corpus of Sunday and Holy Day collects in the 1970 missal is significantly different from that of the 1962 missal without, however, replicating in any subsection the contents of the corresponding subsection of another Mass book. The post-Vatican II editors made changes to the ancient collects and composed new ones. For this reason, the essay also examines editorial practices at work in the selection and revision of ancient orations and in the confection of new collects.

The significance of the material changes in the collects increases greatly if it signals substantive changes in the theological or spiritual import of the resulting corpus of collects. For this reason, the quantitative analysis is followed by a comparative examination of the four Advent Sunday collects4 of the respective missals in order to ascertain whether the two sets express the same truths of faith and accent the same aspects of Christian existence, and if they do not, to identify the key differences. This second level of inquiry finds that when the Church prays the 1970 Advent collects she assumes a markedly different posture before God and seeks very different things from him compared to her posture and petitions in praying the 1962 set.

Because the Advent Sunday collects comprise the smallest single subset of Sunday or Holy Day collects, it would be a serious error to draw conclusions about the whole corpus of Sunday and Holy Day collects in the 1970 missal on the basis of these findings. Nevertheless, the extent both of the material changes in the full set of collects and of the substantial changes in the Advent Sunday collects raises the question of whether the new corpus of collects expresses a significantly different understanding of relations between God and his Church, and whether, in consequence, it forms the faithful who pray by means of it differently from the way in which its predecessor formed previous generations. Needless to say, this question deserves serious scholarly attention. Unless we know how our present liturgical texts are like and unlike those used by earlier generations, and how we may be different on their account, our understanding

and Historical Aspects of the Roman Missal, The Proceedings of the Fifth International Colloquium on Historical, Theological, and Canonical Studies on the Roman Catholic Liturgy (Kingston and Surbiton: Centre International d'Études Liturgiques, 2000), 127-64, which is briefly discussed below.3 The revisers mined ancient liturgical codices.4 That is, those of the first season of the liturgical year.

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The Collects at Sunday Mass: An Examination of the Revisions of Vatican II

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