I think it’s important to realize that the mass has a prayer called the collect for a reason, it’s supposed to ‘collect’ the prayers of the faithful and lift them up to God in heaven.
I don’t think so, actually. The Oxford English Dictionary contains this explanatory commentary about the background of the term:
As to the origin and history of the term, we are indebted mainly to the Rev. F. E. Warren, M.A., for the following notes: the Gregorian Sacramentary (ed. Muratori, 22, 28, 116) has in one place
oratio ad collectam, and twice simply
collecta (to which also the first is shortened in later copies), as the title of a prayer said at one of the appointed stations where the people
collected in order to proceed together to the church where mass was said. Here the meaning was ‘a prayer for (or at) the collection or gathering’. But of even earlier date is the use, in the Gallican liturgies, of
collectio, passing later into
collecta, as a title of prayers, especially those of the mass, in which the sense was evidently the
collecting or summing up in a prayer of the thought sketched out in the
Rogatio or
bidding, or suggested by the
capitula for the day. It was from this source that the term, as a more or less general equivalent for
oratio, passed into the mediæval French and English missals and breviaries (see
Paris Brev. 1836,
Rubricæ Generales xii;
Rituale Dunelmensis (Surtees Soc.)
passim;
Sarum Breviary (ed. 1882), Index,
Sarum Missal (Burntisl. 1861) 3; *Hereford Missal *p. xxxv;
York Missal (Surtees) I. 169, etc.), and thence, again, into the Book of Common Prayer, where it is the title of such prayers as were taken directly from the Breviary or other Service-books of the Sarum use, and of new compositions of the same type. Neither
collecta nor
collectio occurs as a title, or in a rubric, in the Roman Missal or Breviary, or in any authorized Roman Service-books; but the term is popularly applied, at least in France and England, to ‘the prayer in the Mass, after the Gloria and before the Epistle’ (see
Catholic Dict. s.v.; also Littré).
It does not appear that there was any original connexion between the Roman and Gallican uses of
collecta here mentioned; but from an early period etymologizing writers tried to connect them, so as to derive the collect from both at once: see the
Micrologus (c 1100) iii, of Gallican authorship, Joh. Bekethus
Divin. Offic. Explicatio (
a 1200) xxxvii, Durandus Rationale
Div. Off. (
a 1300) iv. xv. §13; see also
Dict. of Christian Antiq. s.v., and Canon Bright ‘On the Collects’ in the
Prayer-Book Commentary (S.P.C.K.).
