When it is said
The Gelasian Sacramentary sets it among the “prayers after a person’s death”. The prayers for carrying the body to the grave follow them.
The book holds the priest’s part of the services, but this prayer speaks for all who mourn. A family might pray it together in the first hours after a death, or one person alone.
Where it comes from
No author known
An early Roman book
The prayer comes from the Gelasian Sacramentary, the book of the priest’s prayers in the early church of Rome. Its Roman core was written between AD 628 and 715, and it survives in a Frankish copy made about AD 750. Only one older service book of the Western Church has come down to us.
H. A. Wilson (ed.), The Gelasian Sacramentary (1894), page 295; The Cult of Saints database, University of Oxford, E07005
A prayer for everyone gathered
Just before it, the priest speaks to the people, his “dearest brothers”, and asks them to join him in remembering their dear one, whom the Lord has taken from the temptations of this world. This prayer then speaks for all of them, as people whose hearts have been wounded by a death.
H. A. Wilson (ed.), The Gelasian Sacramentary (1894), page 295
The Scripture in it
… before the dust returns to the ground from which it came and the spirit returns to God Who gave it.
Bible text: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.
In Latin
Diri vulneris novitate perculsi, et quodammodo cordibus sauciati,
misericordiam tuam, mundi redemptor, flebilibus vocibus imploramus,
ut cari nostri N. animam ad te datorem proprium revertentem
blande leniterque suscipias,
et si quas illa ex hac carnali commoratione contraxit maculas,
tu, Deus, inolita bonitate clementer deleas,
pie indulgeas, oblivioni in perpetuum tradas,
atque hanc eandem laudes tibi cum ceteris reddituram,
et ad corpus quandoque reversuram,
sanctorum tuorum coetibus aggregari praecipias.
Per Dominum.