I am pleased to announce the publication of a new research aid for the prayers of the Roman Rite, specifically the post-communion orations.
The Post-Communion Prayers in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite aims to provide easy access to the Latin source texts for all 382 unique post-communion prayers from every section of the Roman Missal as reformed after the Second Vatican Council (i.e. Proper of Time, Proper of Saints, Commons, Ritual Masses, Various Needs & Occasions, Votive Masses, and Masses for the Dead).
Readers will thus be able to compare any given post-communion prayer with its source text(s), to observe any differences between them, and how major or minor such differences might be in terms of tone, vocabulary, style, theology, etc. Where a given prayer in the post-Vatican II Missale Romanum has been changed from its source, these have been highlighted to assist the reader. Along with references to the critical editions of the various source texts, references to the Corpus Orationum and Corpus Praefationum series of volumes (Brepols) have also been provided where possible, to aid further research.
To complement this work, a bibliography of studies on the sources of the post-Vatican II Missale Romanum has been provided, along with extracts from relevant documents of the working groups of the Consilium ad exsequendam (specifically Coetus XIII and XVIII bis) and the magisterium of the Church. Various statistics, indices and other data are contained at the end of the book.
It should be noted that the existing lists of sources sometimes designate a post-communion oration as a “new composition.” Of course, not all of these have been composed completely from scratch, and during my research for this book, I have made an attempt to reference extra-liturgical sources (e.g. biblical, conciliar) where they seemed obvious to me. Still, there is much more investigation to be carried out on the sources and inspirations for many of these texts, and I hope that this volume can contribute to this, as well as to the wider research on the composition and editing of the texts of the usus recentior.
