ALERT: A small percentage of orations from our Roman heritage survived the the scissors and paste-pots of Bugnini and his merry band of experts in the Consilium. This is one of them.
Today’s Collect was in the ancient Veronese and Gelasian Sacramentaries, and so it represents the best of the liturgical tradition of the early Church in Rome, formed out of the cultural, intellectual, spiritual milieu of the era. In the Novus Ordo you find it as the Collect for Saturday after Ash Wednesday in the Ordinary Form.
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus,
infirmitatem nostram propitius respice,
atque ad protegendum nos
dexteram tuae maiestatis extende.
There is an elegance to these ancient prayers which hard to capture in English without resorting to nearly archaic forms. However, archaic forms do help us to separate both the content and intent of the prayer from the banal, ephemeral and commonplace. I think this is necessary to do in liturgical prayer at all times, but especially today when a sense of the sacred needs to be recaptured.
Breaking it down, we have the protasis or prelude with the asyndeton invocation. The infirmitas surely connects to the illnesses of the leper and centurion in the Gospel reading for this Sunday. It also serves to underscore that God is almighty by contrast.
I always like prayers with respice… it as if when we call out to God, He stops and turns to look back at us. As if we were ever out of His sight! Psalm 139:
7 Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!
9 If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
10 even there thy hand shall lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me.
11 If I say, “Let only darkness cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
12 even the darkness is not dark to thee,
the night is bright as the day;
for darkness is as light with thee.
13 For thou didst form my inward parts,
thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.
The apodosis or them comes along with atque.
Words like maiestas hark to attributes of God such as Hebrew kabod, Greek doxa, and Latin gloria. Maiestas, with a pronoun, can also be construed as a title, such as “Your Majesty”. So, we could happily say, “stretch out Your Majesty’s right hand”. Graphic anthropomorphism.
LITERAL RENDERING
Almighty eternal God,
look graciously upon our feebleness;
and, in order to protect us,
stretch forth the right hand of Your majesty.
NEW CORRECTED ICEL:
Almighty ever-living God,
look with compassion on our weakness
and ensure us your protection
by stretching forth the right hand of your majesty.
The right hand.
God’s power and authority was lent by Christ Himself to the Church He founded and entrusted to Peter and the Apostles in union with him. Until the end of time, the Catholic Church exercises Christ’s authority to teach, govern and sanctify. We who are weak can gain from this sheltering attribute of the Church, which shield and protects us from error.
It might also happen, this same solider perhaps commits an error or a crime. In normal circumstances, this might result in the penalty of death by flogging with the scourge. The imperator, the commander in chief of the legion, extends his hand over the solider in a sign of forgiveness. Extending a hand over a slave was also the sign of manumission, a formal symbol of setting a slave free, having juridical effect.
succor
protection
forgiveness
When the hand of the priest is extended over us in the confessional, we are sheltered from the attacks of hell, the hideous heat that would consume us, the eternal bondage to the enemy which would for ever separate us from God’s sight.
When was the last time you sought out the right hand of God in the context of the confessional?
How long has it been since, after confession all your mortal sins in both number and kind, you have heard the words, “Deus Pater misericordiarum… God the Father of mercies…”
