Why the 1962 Breviary is not 'traditional'

And never should be portrayed as such

(What follows is in no way any kind of attempt to discourage anyone, any layman at least, from praying the 1962 Breviary.  It is an excellent and accessible way to begin praying the Latin Office.  This is more to inform Catholics as to what the 1962 Breviary is and what it is not and to encourage whatever clergy might happen across this article to man up and start doing their jobs.)

XIII Kalendas Novembris (20 October) Anno Incarnations MMXXIV

Dominica XXII post Pentecosten

The thirteenth and fourteenth Sundays after Pentecost in the 1962 Breviary. (source) Photo credit: MK at Polish Wikipedia

The Divine Office sadly does not receive anywhere near the attention that the Mass does in discussions of the massive changes inflicted on the Liturgy of the Western Church during the 20^th century.  And unfortunately when it does those who refer to themselves as ‘traditionalists,’ including a great many clergy, will hold up the 1962 Breviary and say that this is the ‘traditional’ Breviary of the Church.  And by using this word they strongly imply that if you are praying the 1962 Breviary then you are praying the Divine Office as the Church of Rome always prayed it up until the Second Vatican Council. 

But that is pure poppycock and reveals a shocking ignorance of basic liturgical history on the part of a great deal of the so called ‘trad’ commentariat who should really know better.  But it fits in with the black and white and historically false narrative that many of them try to sell that everything before ‘the Council’ was good and it was only with Vatican II that the crisis started.  And it fits in as well with their completely unwarranted lionizing of Pope Pius X because he wrote Pascendi and instituted what ended up being a completely useless so called ‘oath against modernism’¹ which they take as some sort of heroic deed.

Yet Pius X also in an act completely without precedent whose chutzpah would make Paul VI² blush unilaterally dismantled in 1911³ the 1500 year old Roman Psalter⁴ and replaced it with a completely modernistic creation of his own.  It has taken a serious bait and switch to portray this guy as some sort of hero of tradition but they have somehow managed to pull it off.  You even have a society of priests who claim themselves to be the saviors of ‘tradition’ running around singing hymns to him and calling themselves by his name.

This therefore is a chief reason why the 1962 Breviary is not ‘traditional’.  Its heart and soul, the Order of the Psalms, has absolutely nothing to do with actual Catholic tradition.  It is true it does use the Vulgate text of the Psalms despite Pius XII’s best efforts⁵ to remove it during the 1940s and ‘50s and that is a point in its favor but its ordering of those same Psalms is in fact a complete and total disorder that is entirely at variance with the way the Psalms had been continuously and daily recited at Rome probably since the fall of the Western Empire if not earlier - and was in fact created to accommodate clerical laziness. 

This last point was what set the tone for all of the liturgical disasters of the twentieth century.  They were all done to accommodate clerical laziness.  It was a straight line from 1911 when Pius X gave into the clerical whining about how much time they had to spend praying Sunday Matins⁶ to the clergy of the 1960s not even being willing to learn Latin anymore.

But there are a hundred other little details in the way the 1962 Breviary is prayed that conspire to make it I would argue anti-traditional.  Here though we will deal with only three of them.   

The antiphons

The first are the antiphons.  With a single exception the standard method of reciting an antiphon in the Western Divine Office throughout its recorded history was to start with only the first few words of the antiphon prior to the Psalm (or group of Psalms), then to recite the Psalm, and only at the end following the Gloria Patri recite the entire antiphon.  In the twentieth century Breviaries the break in the antiphon is usually marked with an asterisk though in older Breviaries sometimes with a colon, a comma, or not at all.  An example from the second antiphon at Laudes from the Common of a Confessor Bishop:

Non est inventus * similis illi qui conservaret legem Excelsi

The words Non est inventus are recited by themselves prior to the Psalm and then following the concluding Gloria Patri the entire antiphon Non est inventus similis illi qui conservaret legem Excelsi is recited.  The only exception to this practice were on Duplex feasts and even there only at the hours of Matins, Laudes, and Vespers.  At every other hour every day of the year the antiphons were recited in this manner… until January 1, 1961 when the so called ‘1962 Breviary’ went into effect.

According to the rubrics of this Breviary, called ‘traditional’ by so many, the antiphons, in an entirely new (and quite unnecessary) practice, are to be recited⁷ in their entirety both before and after the Psalm at every hour of every day all of the time.  Thus a living custom of the West that went back deep into the mists of time and history was suddenly gone.

On the superficial level this might seem like a small and somewhat insignificant change - but it is not.  When one recites the Hours of Divine Office hour by hour, day by day, and month by month throught the years of one’s life this change has a tremendous effect both on one’s experience and perception. 

The primary thing is that the correct way of reciting the antiphon with a few words (sometimes only one) before the Psalm and the whole thing being sung only at the end creates a wonderful sense of tension and release.  And when this is repeated hour after hour day after day a terrific and quite musical sense of motion is created.  This is something that is entirely missing from the 1962 Breviary.

The Calendar and the Octaves

Three extremely important feasts of the highest rank which had been celebrated since the first millennium all the way through 1955 were taken out of the calendar around 1960 and are thus missing from the 1962 Breviary.  These feasts which strangely enough all fall during the month of May are: The Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross on May 3, the Feast of Saint John at the Latin Gate on May 6, and the Feast of the Apparition of Saint Michael the Archangel at Gargano on May 8.

All three of these are very ancient and very important feasts of the highest order which as said have been on the calendar since the first millennium and there was absolutely no call to remove any of them.  Nor in truth was their removal in any way valid.  This is an area where the constant custom and tradition throughout the centuries is a law unto itself that no pope has the power to change.

The other issue with the 1962 calendar is the fact that it is missing a great number of Octaves that had been present on the Western Calendar for very many centuries as Pius XII declared⁸ in 1955⁹ that the clergy were no longer permitted to celebrate any Octaves save those of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.  A list of the Octaves which therefore are not present in the 1962 Beviary is as follows:

The Octave of Saint Stephen

The Octave of Saint John

The Octave of the Holy Innocents

The Octave of the Epiphany

The Octave of the Ascension¹⁰

The Octave of Corpus Christi

The Octave of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

The Octave of Saints Peter and Paul

The Octave of Saint Lawrence

The Octave of the Assumption

The Octave of the Nativity of Mary

The Octave of All Saints

One can sense how the ripping away of all of these eight day stretches of liturgical prayer, twelve in all, would tend to mutilate a liturgical calendar.  What is more is that these Octaves, these continuous eight day stretches of public liturgical prayer, also create a wonderful sense of day to day motion towards a goal throughout the year which is entirely missing¹¹ in the 1962 Breviary.

The liturgical day

And now to possibly the most¹² anti-traditional feature of the 1962 Breviary: the liturgical day.  The structure of the liturgical day going back deep into the Old Testament was that the course of the day went from evening to evening.  I did a longer article dedicated solely to this topic here but suffice it to say every liturgical feast would start in some way shape or form the evening prior to the calendar day it was assigned to.

This contrast between the liturgical day and the solar/astronomical day produces a vivid effect of otherworldliness.  One day is constantly passing into another during waking hours. Again there is a vivid sense of motion here.  The feast which begins as the sun is going down proceeds through the night hours of sleep to be encountered once again upon waking.  There is something magical and dreamlike and again otherworldly about this.

The 1962 Breviary has none of this.  Its rubrics have a hyper-modernistic conception of time stating explicitly that the liturgical day¹³ runs from midnight to midnight - which is a timeframe that can only be measured by modern mechanical clocks and would have been completely alien to anyone’s experience any time before say the mid 19^th century. 

The sense of flow and of motion and the unity of time is thus destroyed and one is left with a series of individual days bumping up against one another.  The effect is rather like the chunk chunk chunk aspect of the Novus Ordo that so many ‘trads’ are constantly complaining about but seem completely oblivious to when it comes to the 1962 Breviary.

The end

These individual practices were worthy of preservation in and of themselves but their disappearance together had the cumulative effect of cutting the heart out of the 1962 Breviary.  It only looks good because it is not the Liturgy of the Hours.  Beyond that it is the mirage of a golden chalice that in reality has rotten wine in it.  The golden chalice is the Latin language and the Vulgate Psalms along with its retention of some, but only some, of the forms of the ancient Office while the rotten wine is everything they took away from the actual ‘traditional’ way of saying the Office.

There is no conceivable way that this thing can or ever should be called ‘traditional’.  Its basic structure has been robbed of the ancient heart of the Divine Office and replaced by numerous modernistic features designed primarily to accommodate the laziness of priests.  The fact that almost every group of priests and vowed religious who claim that they are dedicated to restoring the Roman Church’s liturgical traditions are still using this thing is an embarrassment.  

It is like a millstone hanging around the neck of the traditionalist movement because they can yammer on about the Mass all they want but when they are praying this thing they are only going halfway. 

There seems to be an idea in the mind of some of these people that they are under some sort of legal or moral obligation to pray the 1962 Breviary when nothing could be further from the truth.  Summorum Pontificum (if this aspect of it was ever really binding) has been rescinded so if you are concerned about the letter, and the letter alone, of Canon law then you had better start praying the Liturgy of the Hours. 

But if you judge correctly that there is something more going on here than Canon Law, especially a Code of Canon Law dreamed up and enforced by men whom the evidence shows us we should have grave doubts about their allegiance to the Catholic faith, then you should be praying some sort of Office that uses the actual Roman Psalter along with all of the customs and practices that were common to the Western Church prior to the 20^th century.

Again I am speaking here of priests and religious who have the training, the time, the resources, and quite frankly the duty to do this.  If a layman or woman wants to start out praying the Latin Office by using the 1962 Roman Breviary then I wholeheartedly encourage them to do so.  It is the most accessible and easiest to obtain and probably the easiest to figure out for a beginner and praying it will undoubtedly bring great benefit to your life. 

But nobody should be under any illusions about what this thing is and what it isn’t.  While the 1962 Breviary does contain many beautiful traditional elements it is by no means whatsoever the ‘traditional’ way of saying the Roman Office and it should absolutely never be portrayed as such.

(As a reference Divinum Officium has a pretty good summary of the changes to the Divine Office between 1911 and 1960 here)

1. This oath was a joke. The modernist movement was built like Jansenism before it on the heretics staying within the visible structures of the Church to poison it from the inside. They would feign orthodoxy while sowing doubt and confusion. The idea that a single one time oath would stop a movement that was by the early twentieth century built on and well practiced in deception, duplicity, and doublespeak is a joke. The best thing Paul VI ever did was to get rid of that farce.

2. The fact that ‘trads’ complain about Paul VI so much but largely give Pius X a complete pass is really astounding. At least Paul VI could claim that he was following the will of an Ecumenical Council whereas Pius X just got up one day and destroyed 1500 years of tradition all on his own.

3. Apostolic Constitution Divino Afflatu issued 1 November 1911. Latin text here

4. Yes I am aware that Pius V in 1568 took five Psalms out of Sunday Prime and spread them throughout the week. I think it was a very bad decision and it set a very bad precedent and I would encourage anyone who sets out to pray the Roman Office to put Psalms 21-25 back in their proper place at Sunday Prime but that wasn’t even in the same universe compared to what Pius X did.

5. In cotidianis precibus 25 March 1945

6. One of the more annoying parts of reading Batiffol’s History of the Roman Breviary (written at the end of the 19th century) is the way he keeps whining throughout his history that nobody ever would get rid of the 18 Psalms of Sunday Matins. I mean really what else do you guys have to do? What was their pressing engagement? You’re a priest and your job is to pray - so do it.

One of their frequent falsely pious sounding complaints that really makes one want to vomit was that our poor priests couldn’t pray the Psalter anymore because they had to spend so much time ‘caring for souls.’

a) Prayer is caring for souls and b) no generation of priests ever did less for the good of souls than the generation that followed Divino Afflatu

7. Rubricae Generalis Brevarii Romani caput V: (D)

8. Cum nostra hac aetate tit. ii sec. c para 11

9. Part of the problem here does go back to Pius X in 1911. He created such a complicated set of rubrics for the celebration of Octaves that those who were canonically required to pray the Office according to Divino Afflatu oftentimes found themselves confused about what they should be praying and what not.

10. Weirdly enough instead of the Octaves of the Epiphany and the Ascension the 1962 Breviary invented something new called the ‘time (or season) of the Epiphany (and the Ascension). You really have to scratch your head and wonder why they didn’t just leave them in there.

Likewise the Octave Days of Saint Stephen, Saint John, the Holy Innocents (more info on these here) plus the Vigil of the Epiphany would fill in the gap perfectly between the Octave of Christmas and the Epiphany but since these are missing from the 1962 Breviary one instead encounters the wholly invented four day ‘season’ of Christmas.

11. I get very amused when I hear the 1962 crowd congratulate themselves and get on their high horse every year during the Octave of Pentecost about how the Novus Ordo doesn’t celebrate that Octave and they do. What about the dozen Octaves that were being celebrated in 1954 that you guys won’t have anything to do with? I really wonder whether some of these people know anything about what they are talking about or whether they even care.

12. Even more so perhaps than the order of the Psalms because the practice of the day starting at eventide was already long in use before the Psalms were even written.

13. Rubricae Generales caput II: 4