When it is said
In the old Roman book it is the collect, the opening prayer, of one of the Masses for ordinary Sundays.
Pray it when you cannot see what tomorrow will bring and want to leave it with God.
Where it comes from
No author known
Where it comes from
The prayer is kept in the Old Gelasian book, the second oldest Latin service book to survive. Its one manuscript, now in the Vatican Library, was copied in the land of the Franks about AD 750. The book’s Roman core goes back to prayers written between AD 628 and 715.
H. A. Wilson, The Gelasian Sacramentary (Oxford, 1894), page 225; The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, University of Oxford, record E07005
In the Prayer Book
The English Book of Common Prayer made it the prayer for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity, beginning “O God, Whose never-failing providence”. In 1864 the scholar William Bright traced that prayer back to the Gelasian book.
The Book of Common Prayer (1662), the Eighth Sunday after Trinity; William Bright, Ancient Collects (third edition, 1864), on archive.org
In Latin
Deus, cuius providentia in sui dispositione non fallitur,
te supplices exoramus,
ut noxia cuncta submoveas,
et omnia nobis profutura concedas. Per.
From the Gelasian Sacramentary, ed. H. A. Wilson (Oxford, 1894), page 225, on archive.org.