This Sunday’s Collect prayer – in the Extraordinary Form:
Da, quaesumus, Domine, populo tuo diabolica vitare contagia: et te solum Deum pura mente sectari.
The phrase diabolica vitare contagia is a glory of the Latin Church’s millennial life of prayer.
Note the wonder assonance and the separate of diabolica from contagia by the verb, a use of hyberbaton.
This Collect, used for centuries in the post-Tridentine Missale Romanum, is in ancient prayer books such as the Liber Sacramentorum Gellonensis, a form of the Gelasian Sacramentary. It appears as the Collect for the Sunday after the Autumn Ember days (Spring in the Southern climes, though that wasn’t a consideration of the ancients). As such, it would have been a time of prayer and fasting and for ordinations.
