How the parish priest has any time to pray at all with all of the administrative duties that get dumped on them, I'm shocked. As a parish employee seeing how little sleep my pastor gets with 15-16 hour work days, its offensive to say that the breviary reforms are due to clerical laziness. Yes, there are lazy clerics. But the idea that the priestly vocation and monastic vocation are the same and that the long offices which are great for the monastic are also great for the parish priest shows how so many traditionalists are more about the system than anything to do with Jesus Christ.
The priest's job is to pray. To pray and to offer sacrifice. That is why he is called a 'priest'. I do not deny for a single second that there are gigantic problems with the way we do things in Catholic parishes and Catholic life in general at the present moment and that a lot of these are the fault of the laity having mistaken expectations of the role of their priests. Though in their defense I have run into a couple of priests in my time who have put quite a bit of effort into fostering these mistaken expectations in order to increase their power and social influence. So it is a two way street.
Nor do I hold the priests of 2025, at least most of them, accountable for the laziness of their ancestors who did have more time but preferred to spend it on more worldly pursuits. Nor would I in any way wish to make the ancient Roman Office obligatory on them at the present moment under pain of sin. They simply aren't ready for it. But that doesn't mean they can't try. However the idea that the Roman Office is 'monastic' is a falsehood. That canard was sold by the modernists in the leadup to Divino Afflatu but it is historically false. Parish priests said the Roman Office for more than a thousand years before the twentieth century and never had the least bit of problem with it.
There is no 'system' to support the Roman Office now so I have no idea where you are getting that from. But what the Roman Psalter is is a highly successful time tested way that endured for fifteen hundred years to bring people closer to Jesus Christ on the personal, community, and civilizational level.
System probably wasn't the right term for me to use, I don't know what the right term is, maybe there isn't one. I value the Divine Office. I value the Mass. I value following the letter of the law to a T. I am irked anytime there is a violation of existing liturgical law as it is promulgated by the Roman Pontiff. However, following the liturgical law is not point of Christ's life, death, and resurrection. We can become so hyper-focused on how many and which antiphons are in the divine office, how many times a specific psalm was repeated during the week or how many lections and nocturns a priest prayed in the middle of the night and which time, or how many genuflections happen at a Mass or when and how many times the sanctuary bells are rung, but at the moment of judgment I highly doubt that Jesus is going to ask about any of that. He's probably going to ask specifically about the souls in the priest's care. That's what I meant by system vs. Jesus Christ. A parish priest is not a monastic or a contemplative. And so when the Divine Office is so long that the it becomes a burden as the pastoral needs of the flock and community evolve, if we become so rigid about rubrics and the small 't' man-made traditions we risk becoming new Pharisees who accused Jesus of violating the law when he healed on the Sabbath, didn't wash before eating, not fasting when they fasted, etc. He is a priest and a pastor. The sacrifice he offers is the Mass along with the Divine Office, and the value of those sacrifices is not the length of time or number of verses and prayers within each. He is also a pastor, sent to tend the sheep, the souls of his flock. When the office alone can take several hours in whole to pray each day, plus the Mass, plus a Holy Hour, plus the Rosary, there is less and less time to actually tend the sheep. That's the point I'm making. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, likewise the rubrics were made for man, not man for the rubrics. If we really want to go back to long offices let's help our priests transform the world for Christ so that the flock is healthy and mature enough to all for our priests to spend hours every day in the divine office.
Ultimately I can't agree with you when you say this is about the length of time or the number of verses. No one is saying that the Roman Office is better because it's longer. It's better because it's better.
This thing is older than the hills and it was preserved for generation after generation for well in excess of a thousand years. It formed generation after generation of saints. The wicked thing that the popes of the last century did wasn't that they created a new office for parish priests if parish priests are legitimately that busy. Again if they really are that busy it may not have been inappropriate to create some alternative way for them to meet their obligation. No that wasn't the wicked thing - the wicked thing they did was to forbid the ancient Office so that even if a priest did have time and did want to pray it he couldn't. That was what was wicked.
So the standard Greek version of the New Testament may not be as accurate as the Vulgate? What version is it? Commentators often explain a passage by explaining the nuances of the original Greek word for something, could that possibly NOT be the original Greek word used?
Most of the time it seems like it was the original Greek word. But a lot of the times the translations choices they make are very bad seemingly deliberately. There is one place at least where they left out something from the Vulgate. When the Angel greets the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation in the Vulgate he says to her: Ave gratia plena Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulierbus.
'Hail filled with grace the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.' In the Bibles of the last fifty or sixty years they leave out 'Blessed are you among women' because there are a couple of Greek manuscripts where it's not there. But then again there are others where it is there so it should absolutely not have been taken out.
You have missed some of the suppressed Octaves in this excellent article. Add to the list of 12 you give the Octave for the Solemnity of St Joseph, Octaves for both the Titular and Dedication of the particular church, the same for the Cathedral of the diocese and then the Patrons. The latter could be both national, region or local depending on particular calendars. In addition there were Octaves for religious founders etc.
I wasn't aware of the Octave of Saint Joseph. Thank you. You're definitely right about all the other ones though. They were of the local variety so I left them out but maybe I shouldn't have done that. All of the local diversity is what added to the rich mosaic like diversity of the Church's liturgical life.
Well, the Octave for the Solemnity of St Joseph was modern. Another modern one, and another to add to the list was the Octave of the Sacred Heart, added to the Calendar by Pius XI and excised by his immediate successor.
Thank you for the article. I try to avoid using Google Translate but from my knowledge of Latin and Spanish I can kind of fake Italian. I had been wondering when the Octave of the Immaculate Conception came in and it turns out that it was somewhat earlier than I had expected at the end of the 17th century.
I think I left that and the Sacred Heart (which in the end was very ephemeral) off of the list because they didn't stem from immemorial custom i.e. we know where they came from whereas the other octaves seem to have been instituted in a time beyond memory, which made the crime of removing them so much more serious. I would also include the local octaves that you mentioned among those of immemorial custom that should not have been removed.
This is a good piece. Having started to pray "Prima Longa" whenever the office is of Sunday, I found it to be not as long and torturous as some would put it, and in fact, the natural ordering of the psalms is much nicer than saying them out of order on the ferias. The fact they get "knocked out" on Sundays is also nice, as I don't need to worry about Simplexes intruding on ferial Prime.
Question: I was looking at your website and I saw that you have done some work type setting an old breviary. Is this still active? Typesetting breviaries is an area of interest for me but I know almost nothing about the practical side of it and I was wondering if you had anything you could share? Thanks.
Exactly. I was actually kind of afraid to pray the Sunday Office when I started because I had always read how terrible it was. Yes you do have to budget a bit more time but when I started to actually do it I started to think that actually this is kind of nice. It's not bad at all. It feels correct and it finally feels like I'm at rest, at home, and doing things right. Thank you for reading.
How the parish priest has any time to pray at all with all of the administrative duties that get dumped on them, I'm shocked. As a parish employee seeing how little sleep my pastor gets with 15-16 hour work days, its offensive to say that the breviary reforms are due to clerical laziness. Yes, there are lazy clerics. But the idea that the priestly vocation and monastic vocation are the same and that the long offices which are great for the monastic are also great for the parish priest shows how so many traditionalists are more about the system than anything to do with Jesus Christ.
How the parish priest has any time to pray at all with all of the administrative duties that get dumped on them, I'm shocked. As a parish employee seeing how little sleep my pastor gets with 15-16 hour work days, its offensive to say that the breviary reforms are due to clerical laziness. Yes, there are lazy clerics. But the idea that the priestly vocation and monastic vocation are the same and that the long offices which are great for the monastic are also great for the parish priest shows how so many traditionalists are more about the system than anything to do with Jesus Christ.
Thank you for your concern for my spiritual well being. It is very much appreciated. However I would need to see an example of a specific egregious error I have committed before I could consider taking your advice.
How the parish priest has any time to pray at all with all of the administrative duties that get dumped on them, I'm shocked. As a parish employee seeing how little sleep my pastor gets with 15-16 hour work days, its offensive to say that the breviary reforms are due to clerical laziness. Yes, there are lazy clerics. But the idea that the priestly vocation and monastic vocation are the same and that the long offices which are great for the monastic are also great for the parish priest shows how so many traditionalists are more about the system than anything to do with Jesus Christ.
The priest's job is to pray. To pray and to offer sacrifice. That is why he is called a 'priest'. I do not deny for a single second that there are gigantic problems with the way we do things in Catholic parishes and Catholic life in general at the present moment and that a lot of these are the fault of the laity having mistaken expectations of the role of their priests. Though in their defense I have run into a couple of priests in my time who have put quite a bit of effort into fostering these mistaken expectations in order to increase their power and social influence. So it is a two way street.
Nor do I hold the priests of 2025, at least most of them, accountable for the laziness of their ancestors who did have more time but preferred to spend it on more worldly pursuits. Nor would I in any way wish to make the ancient Roman Office obligatory on them at the present moment under pain of sin. They simply aren't ready for it. But that doesn't mean they can't try. However the idea that the Roman Office is 'monastic' is a falsehood. That canard was sold by the modernists in the leadup to Divino Afflatu but it is historically false. Parish priests said the Roman Office for more than a thousand years before the twentieth century and never had the least bit of problem with it.
There is no 'system' to support the Roman Office now so I have no idea where you are getting that from. But what the Roman Psalter is is a highly successful time tested way that endured for fifteen hundred years to bring people closer to Jesus Christ on the personal, community, and civilizational level.
System probably wasn't the right term for me to use, I don't know what the right term is, maybe there isn't one. I value the Divine Office. I value the Mass. I value following the letter of the law to a T. I am irked anytime there is a violation of existing liturgical law as it is promulgated by the Roman Pontiff. However, following the liturgical law is not point of Christ's life, death, and resurrection. We can become so hyper-focused on how many and which antiphons are in the divine office, how many times a specific psalm was repeated during the week or how many lections and nocturns a priest prayed in the middle of the night and which time, or how many genuflections happen at a Mass or when and how many times the sanctuary bells are rung, but at the moment of judgment I highly doubt that Jesus is going to ask about any of that. He's probably going to ask specifically about the souls in the priest's care. That's what I meant by system vs. Jesus Christ. A parish priest is not a monastic or a contemplative. And so when the Divine Office is so long that the it becomes a burden as the pastoral needs of the flock and community evolve, if we become so rigid about rubrics and the small 't' man-made traditions we risk becoming new Pharisees who accused Jesus of violating the law when he healed on the Sabbath, didn't wash before eating, not fasting when they fasted, etc. He is a priest and a pastor. The sacrifice he offers is the Mass along with the Divine Office, and the value of those sacrifices is not the length of time or number of verses and prayers within each. He is also a pastor, sent to tend the sheep, the souls of his flock. When the office alone can take several hours in whole to pray each day, plus the Mass, plus a Holy Hour, plus the Rosary, there is less and less time to actually tend the sheep. That's the point I'm making. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, likewise the rubrics were made for man, not man for the rubrics. If we really want to go back to long offices let's help our priests transform the world for Christ so that the flock is healthy and mature enough to all for our priests to spend hours every day in the divine office.
Ultimately I can't agree with you when you say this is about the length of time or the number of verses. No one is saying that the Roman Office is better because it's longer. It's better because it's better.
This thing is older than the hills and it was preserved for generation after generation for well in excess of a thousand years. It formed generation after generation of saints. The wicked thing that the popes of the last century did wasn't that they created a new office for parish priests if parish priests are legitimately that busy. Again if they really are that busy it may not have been inappropriate to create some alternative way for them to meet their obligation. No that wasn't the wicked thing - the wicked thing they did was to forbid the ancient Office so that even if a priest did have time and did want to pray it he couldn't. That was what was wicked.
So did St Jerome make his translation from original texts that have been lost?
They likely wouldn't have been original but the manuscripts he used very likely were much older and much better sources than anything we have
So the standard Greek version of the New Testament may not be as accurate as the Vulgate? What version is it? Commentators often explain a passage by explaining the nuances of the original Greek word for something, could that possibly NOT be the original Greek word used?
Most of the time it seems like it was the original Greek word. But a lot of the times the translations choices they make are very bad seemingly deliberately. There is one place at least where they left out something from the Vulgate. When the Angel greets the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation in the Vulgate he says to her: Ave gratia plena Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulierbus.
'Hail filled with grace the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.' In the Bibles of the last fifty or sixty years they leave out 'Blessed are you among women' because there are a couple of Greek manuscripts where it's not there. But then again there are others where it is there so it should absolutely not have been taken out.
You have missed some of the suppressed Octaves in this excellent article. Add to the list of 12 you give the Octave for the Solemnity of St Joseph, Octaves for both the Titular and Dedication of the particular church, the same for the Cathedral of the diocese and then the Patrons. The latter could be both national, region or local depending on particular calendars. In addition there were Octaves for religious founders etc.
I wasn't aware of the Octave of Saint Joseph. Thank you. You're definitely right about all the other ones though. They were of the local variety so I left them out but maybe I shouldn't have done that. All of the local diversity is what added to the rich mosaic like diversity of the Church's liturgical life.
Well, the Octave for the Solemnity of St Joseph was modern. Another modern one, and another to add to the list was the Octave of the Sacred Heart, added to the Calendar by Pius XI and excised by his immediate successor.
There is an interesting article concerning Octaves, in two parts - so far, on an Italian liturgical <a href='https://dirigaturdomine.com/2025/01/03/sulle-ottave-parte-1/'>'blog</a> well worth reading.
Thank you for the article. I try to avoid using Google Translate but from my knowledge of Latin and Spanish I can kind of fake Italian. I had been wondering when the Octave of the Immaculate Conception came in and it turns out that it was somewhat earlier than I had expected at the end of the 17th century.
I think I left that and the Sacred Heart (which in the end was very ephemeral) off of the list because they didn't stem from immemorial custom i.e. we know where they came from whereas the other octaves seem to have been instituted in a time beyond memory, which made the crime of removing them so much more serious. I would also include the local octaves that you mentioned among those of immemorial custom that should not have been removed.
Truly liturgical sites and 'blogs are a rarity so I was very pleased when a friend told me of this site.
Thank you very much. And thank you to your friend for spreading the word.
This is a good piece. Having started to pray "Prima Longa" whenever the office is of Sunday, I found it to be not as long and torturous as some would put it, and in fact, the natural ordering of the psalms is much nicer than saying them out of order on the ferias. The fact they get "knocked out" on Sundays is also nice, as I don't need to worry about Simplexes intruding on ferial Prime.
Question: I was looking at your website and I saw that you have done some work type setting an old breviary. Is this still active? Typesetting breviaries is an area of interest for me but I know almost nothing about the practical side of it and I was wondering if you had anything you could share? Thanks.
Exactly. I was actually kind of afraid to pray the Sunday Office when I started because I had always read how terrible it was. Yes you do have to budget a bit more time but when I started to actually do it I started to think that actually this is kind of nice. It's not bad at all. It feels correct and it finally feels like I'm at rest, at home, and doing things right. Thank you for reading.
How the parish priest has any time to pray at all with all of the administrative duties that get dumped on them, I'm shocked. As a parish employee seeing how little sleep my pastor gets with 15-16 hour work days, its offensive to say that the breviary reforms are due to clerical laziness. Yes, there are lazy clerics. But the idea that the priestly vocation and monastic vocation are the same and that the long offices which are great for the monastic are also great for the parish priest shows how so many traditionalists are more about the system than anything to do with Jesus Christ.
How the parish priest has any time to pray at all with all of the administrative duties that get dumped on them, I'm shocked. As a parish employee seeing how little sleep my pastor gets with 15-16 hour work days, its offensive to say that the breviary reforms are due to clerical laziness. Yes, there are lazy clerics. But the idea that the priestly vocation and monastic vocation are the same and that the long offices which are great for the monastic are also great for the parish priest shows how so many traditionalists are more about the system than anything to do with Jesus Christ.
It appears that whatever I try to do it is never good enough. I walk on.
Who said that?
Enlighten me as to my mistake
And what makes one a liturgist?
Thank you for your concern for my spiritual well being. It is very much appreciated. However I would need to see an example of a specific egregious error I have committed before I could consider taking your advice.