This week we encounter a liturgical unicorn. We shall celebrate the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, and the Second Sunday after Epiphany in the Extraordinary. What makes this Sunday rare is that the collect is the same prayer in both.
Although the Council Fathers of Vatican II said that, in the liturgical reform they mandated, nothing should be changed that wasn’t truly for the good of the people and that changes had to flow organically from what went before (SC 23), the editing, re-arranging, transforming and wholesale creating of new prayers was of tectonic magnitude. The traditional Roman Missal has 1,182 orations, of which 36 per cent made it into the newer Missal and, of them, half were altered. Only 17 per cent of the orations remained unchanged. Moreover, many were shifted to other times of the year. This Sunday, however, we have, unchanged, the same collect on the same day in both forms.
