St Michael's Abbey Press – förlag

'The collects are much-neglected springs of living water,' wrote the great Dom Cabrol in 1920. The General Instruction on the Roman Missal tells us that these Opening Prayers gather and summarize all the prayers of the faithful. But what of their history, their form, their vocabulary, their role?

In Appreciating the Collect, scholars from four continents introduce the established textual critical apparatus of Rome's Sant'Anselmo Pontifical Institute of Liturgy, and apply this methodology to specific collects of the 2002 Roman Missal.

Their insights into the history, structure, grammar and vocabulary of the Collect is offered as a service to the whole Church, not only to bishops, academics, and those charged with the onerous task of translation of texts into local languages, but to all who wish to make the words of the Church's prayer their own, and appreciate the Collect.

In the wake of the French Revolution, English Benedictine monks and nuns were forced to leave their monasteries in France and were repatriated in 1795 to England, over thirty years before emancipation was granted to Catholics there. By 1850, when the English Catholic hierarchy was restored, the English Benedictines were still not fully recovered from losses that had been sustained in terms of personnel, finance and property.

This is the first book to have explored in any significant detail the plight of English Benedictine men and women in the half-century following the French Revolution. It highlights their accomplishments at a time of transition and change not just for the Catholic Church in England, but for the whole nation as well as the continent of Europe. It demonstrates that for one particular group of English religious, the early nineteenth century was not an "intertestamental age" characterised by stagnation and listlessness, but an era of new hope, new energy and important foundations. The author has drawn from a rich store of contemporary letters and documents that were previously deemed "far too recent and explosive to be allowed out of locked cupboards into print."

As part of the renewal of the liturgical books called for by the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Missal has undergone substantial revision. This has included a revision of the presidential prayers assigned to the priest. Given the central role of the Missal in the worship of the Church, especially as the ecclesia works to renew itself in response to the Council, these prayers merit comprehensive study. This study, focussing on the collects for the Sundays of Ordinary Time, will attempt to ascertain their liturgical theology of the relation of the Christian people to God. This relationship, in fact, appears to be one of the central concerns reflected in these orations.

Different ways to arrange a church are at odds with each other. The "Order of Mass" was composed with one arrangement in mind, but liturgy is celebrated in churches built or renovated according to another arrangement found in the "General Instruction of the Roman Missal". Bringing these two to a fruitful synthesis requires reclaiming the arrangement at the basis of the "Order of Mass".

This extensive study traces the history, arrangements and theology of the presidential chair as a way of understanding the whole arrangement of a church for liturgy.

An extensive investigation of what the Second Vatican Council said about church architecture is detailed in speeches given at the Council and presented here in English translation for the first time, along with the work preparing for the Council and developing the renewed liturgy implemented after the Council.

The volume concludes with 13 principles for arranging a church for the celebration of liturgy. These are richly illustrated and described in 17 churches located in Rome, England and the Kansas City area.

Presiding at liturgy involves recognising the presence of Christ, the Word of God, and helping the assembly to yield to the promptings of the Spirit by giving itself to Christ present. The art of presiding in the liturgical assembly is considered from the study of the Council and in poetic reflection on the cover image of the touch of Thomas by Caravaggio illustrating the two hands of God at work, both Word and Spirit.

In this book we seek to trace the process of human transformation in the sacraments of Christian initiation celebrated in the context of the Easter vigil, and from this to answer the question of what difference the Easter vigil makes in the life of one celebrating its rites. Other scholars have presented similar studies of the scriptural readings of the Easter vigil, and some have studied one or another of the major prayers of the Easter vigil in depth, but none have presented until now a comprehensive study of the minor euchology of the Easter vigil.

The hermeneutical analysis of the renewed Latin liturgy of the Easter vigil reveals the dimension of Christian maturation by steps, just as we already began to show in the first volume of the series and elsewhere. The careful analysis of the grammatical and internal coherence of the euchology grounds the hermeneutical study in the Latin text of each oration.

Monsignor Lawrence Leslie McReavey influenced generations of priests trained at Ushaw College where he taught for forty-five years and was nicknamed 'Bomb'. In addition to his work for the preparatory Commission of the Second Vatican Council and as a peritus, he was a highly respected Canon Lawyer who worked on the 1938 revision of the Code of Canon Law. For his monumental service to the local and wider church, he was, in 1989, appointed a Protonotary Apostolic. He died the following year aged eighty-seven.

This short and accessible volume tells the remarkable story of Father Augustine Hoey, a Catholic priest with his roots in the missionary tradition of Anglo-Catholicism, in both the UK and Africa. Written to mark his hundredth birthday the book draws on the personal recollections and writings of Fr Hoey as well as impressions from those who have met him and, in many cases, had their lives changed as a result.

Through various moments of drama, such as surviving a wartime bomb and witnessing the tightening grip of apartheid in South Africa, Fr Hoey's active life has concealed an inner desire for contemplation and intercessory prayer.

After becoming a Roman Catholic in the 1990s, his work as confessor, spiritual guide and preacher was based at Westminster Cathedral. At the age of 98, he moved to Walsingham, Norfolk to fulfil the vocation he felt as an undergraduate on his first visit to the Shrine of Our Lady.

As well as being of interest to anyone who has met or heard of Fr Hoey, the book offers evocative scenes of a life of stability through a century of change.