Collect

A short form of prayer peculiar to Western church liturgies. It consists of an invocation of God, a petition, a pleading of Christ's merits, and an ascription of praise to God. The term itself (collecta) is found originally in the Gallican Rite,* and there it appears to mean the “collecting” of the individuals' silent petitions into a public and corporate form. Another possibility is to connect the term with the assembly (collecta) of people which gathered at each of the churches in Rome and said a prayer (oratio ad collectam) before proceeding to the stational church for the papal Mass. Most of the Sunday collects in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer* are freely translated from the Latin (largely from the Sarum service books and the Gelasian Sacramentary); the remainder were composed by Thomas Cranmer* and others, or were added later in 1662.