From the National Catholic Register:
During the sacrifice of the Mass, the last part of the Introductory Rites is a prayer called the Collect.
In our current version, this is called the Opening Prayer, but, in fact, “collect” is a richer word, and it will be useful for us to begin employing it to refer to this prayer.
All that we have done so far in the liturgy — the entrance procession with its chant, the Penitential Act, and on some days the Gloria — is now “collected” in a focused way by the prayer the priest proclaims. This prayer is always proper to the day, and, as such, it gives a precise focus to the particular celebration that is now under way.
The collects of the new translation are much richer. They follow more closely the structure of the original Latin form for this prayer.
In fact, each of the various prayers of the liturgy has its own literary form. Just as there are rules for composing a sonnet and the sonnet finds its beauty by expression within that form, so a collect has its form on which innumerable variations are possible.
In Latin, a collect is usually one long sentence. Our current English breaks this up into several sentences, but the new version restores the single sentence.
This will help us to grasp the unity of the various parts and how they all fit together into forming the “logic” of the prayer. It will require greater attention by the priest who proclaims it and by the people listening, but, surely, greater attention will mean a kind of renewal for us all.
In fact, there are several forms possible in collects. I will speak here about the most common form. It begins 1) by addressing God, often simply “O God,” or just as often with a slightly expanded title like “Almighty ever-living God.” It is interesting to note that collects never begin by addressing God as “Father,” as happens in scores of collects in our present version, where the liberty was taken to change the Latin forms of address.
Next, 2) the prayer continues with a phrase that begins with the word who, that is “O God, who …” Here, any number of possibilities may follow, but it is always remembering something God has done in the past or does for us now. So, in fact, we are naming God and calling upon him as the one who saved us in the incarnation of his Son or who raised his Son from the dead or who sanctifies the Church by the Spirit.
