Daily Office Part 3: Evensong 101

    My apologies for the delay between posts. I just started my undergrad and had to move in. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this instruction on how to pray Evensong. The base fundamentals are the same as Mattins. Enjoy!     

   

    Evensong is the second of the two major hours. It mirrors Mattins in structure, and some elements are repeated. The introduction to Evensong is identical to that of Mattins, with the verses from Scripture, then the exhortation, and finally confession and absolution (not sacramental, but similar to what is done at the confeitor in the Mass). After that, the opening responses are said. Unlike Mattins, there is no Invitatory psalm; instead, you go straight into the recitation of the Psalter (flip your maroon ribbon). You just need to find the day and the time (e.g., day 23 and morning prayer). After the Psalter, use your purple ribbon, and the First Lesson is read. Then flip back to the Ordinary and read the Magnificat. After the Magnificat, flip back to the lessons (purple ribbon). After that, you will read the Nunc dimittis. Following the Nunc dimittis, you will say the Apostles Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Versicles and Responses. Finally, flip to the Collect of the day (red ribbon) and then recite the two ordinary collects. Then pray the prayers for the monarch, clergy, and finally the Prayer of St. John Chrysostom. After that, you are done and have finally prayed Evensong. 

    I hope this instruction was useful and beneficial. In the future, when I become more used to writing, I may revise this in the future. In the meantime, God bless. 

Daily Office Part 2: Mattins 101

    So now that I have detailed the history of Divine Worship: Daily Office and a basic outline of the book itself, it is now time to actually pray. I will essentially walk through how to pray a simplified version of Mattins. I will follow the layout of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a reference. Perhaps I will do an intro to that book as well in the future. When it comes to placing ribbons, place the red ribbon in the section for the Collect of the day, the yellow ribbon in the Ordinary for Mattins, the purple ribbon in the lessons, and the maroon ribbon in the Psalter. Once that is finished, we can begin. 

    To begin, open to the Introduction to Morning and Evening Prayer. There you will see a list of scripture quotations. Read one or more. Then read the exhortation. There are two available. The first one is the one found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the second one is a shorter version taken from a later source. After that, you should then recite the "Almighty and most merciful Father...". After that, recite the Collect for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity. Then the intro is recited, followed by the Invitatory Psalm, which is always Psalm 95 except on the nineteenth day of the month, when Psalm 95 is appointed in the Psalter. On those days, you can pray Psalm 100 instead. The Invitatory can be said with an antiphon, but for simplicity's sake, we will omit the antiphon for now. After the Invitatory Psalm is the Psalter. Flip to the Psalter using the maroon ribbon. The Psalter is in a thirty-day cycle. Find today's date and the heading "morning prayer". Conclude each Psalm with the Gloria Patri. After the Psalms comes the first lesson. Flip to the lessons with the purple ribbon. The lessons are arranged around Sunday, so find the Sunday (ex., Fourth Sunday after Trinity) and the day of the week after that Sunday (ex., Tuesday after the Fourth Sunday after Trinity). After the first lesson is the Te Deum Laudamus or the Benedicite Omnia Opera. After the Te Deum or the Benedicite Omnia is the second lesson. Following the second lesson is the Apostle's Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and Versicles and Responses. After the Versicles and Responses are the Collects. The first Collect changes (flip to the Collect section using your red ribbon). The last two Collects never change. Following the Collects are prayers for the Church and for the King. Finally, you always end Mattins with the Prayer of St. John Chrysostom. That is it. You have officially prayed Mattins according to Divine Worship: Daily Office. 

    I hope this guide was useful to you. As always, do not be afraid to make mistakes. Just keep pushing through, even if you have no idea what is going on and you are lost. Learning how to pray a Breviary takes time, so please do not be hard on yourself. As always, may the saints intercede for us all, Amen. 

Daily Office Part 1: Outline

  When you open Divine Worship: Daily Office, you are greeted by an etching taken from the Wilton Diptych, depicting Our Lady and the Infant flanked by the Angelic Hosts. I find this striking, as it emphasises the continuity that this book has with the Anglican tradition. Then you open to the table of contents. I will give an outline of Divine Worship: Daily Office based on the table of contents. First, a general description of the book itself. It is black with a large gold Canterbury cross on the cover. It is 2033 pages long and has six ribbons (Red, Green, Yellow, Maroon, Purple, and Pink). The book is printed on Bible paper and has a red gold gilding. It holds up quite well, but the cover may fall off. Now that the exterior of Divine Worship: Daily Office has been detailed, let us examine the interior.

    I will first provide an outline of the table of contents and then explain each one in detail.

1. Decrees
2. General Introduction
3. Table of Liturgical Days
4. The Calendar
5. Table of Lessons
6. Collects
7. Supplementary Texts
8. Quicunque Vult (The Creed of St. Athanasius)
9. The Litany
10. Occasional Prayers and Thanksgivings
11. Ordinary of the Divine Office
12. The Psalter
13. The Lessons
14. Appendices

The first section contains decrees from Msgr. Keith Newton and Msgr. Carl Reid. These men were the Ordinaries when the book was published. These decrees declare that the book is suitable for use by the priests and religious of the Ordinariates. Another interesting detail is the inclusion of Pope Francis’s coat of arms. Both Divine Worship: Daily Office and Divine Worship: The Missal were promulgated under Pope Francis—a very admirable part of his legacy.

    The General Introduction to Divine Worship: Daily Office provides a brief overview of the liturgical hours. It also contains the rubrics for saying the office. For a layperson, these rubrics are not that important, but priests are obliged to follow them. Then comes the Table of Liturgical Days. Divine Worship: Daily Office uses the 1969 system of feasts, with solemities, feasts, memorials, and optional memorials. The Table of Liturgical Days is a system for priests and religious to determine the rubrics and precedence for feast days. You could also use the Ordo available online, or use the online version of the office to figure out what propers you are using for that day. The Table of Liturgical Days is a neat, if often unused, section. 

    The Calendar used in Divine Worship: Daily Office (and by extension the Ordinariates) is a masterpiece. Both the Tridentine and Pauline feasts are included. As mentioned before, this calendar contains ancient traditions that were discarded in the 1960s and 1970s (Ember Days and Rogation Days). This calendar also features the feasts of great saints, such as St. John Henry Newman, St. Junípero Serra, and St. Maximilian Kolbe, who were all canonised after the Second Vatican Council. The calendar also commemorates the feast day of St. Gregory Narek, a Doctor of the Church. He was canonised by the Armenian Apostolic Church, and in 2021, Pope Francis recognized his canonisation and added his feast to the Church’s Calendar. Divine Worship: Daily Office also follows the traditional naming of the seasons, with Sundays after Epiphany, Septuagesima, and Sundays after Trinity. 

    Following the Calendar is the Table of Lessons. This section is largely obsolete, as it lists the verse and chapter for all the lessons of the year; however, those lessons are already included in the Lessons chapter. Most copies of the Book of Common Prayer required the use of a Bible for the lessons. So in those books, a table like the one found in Divine Worship: Daily Office made sense. I guess this is for the people who want to use the King James or Douay-Rheims for their scripture instead of the Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition 2nd Edition, which is the translation used in the included lessons. The Table of Lessons does contain some proper Psalms for certain solemnities and feasts, yet for beginners, these will go unused. However, later on, they provide a deep sense of richness to the liturgical year. 

    The Collects, Supplementary Texts, and The Creed of St. Athanasius (Quicunque Vult) are where the “Anglican” character of Divine Worship: Daily Office becomes increasingly apparent. The collects for Sundays are directly from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The Collects for saints’ feast days are taken from a variety of sources. This includes the Anglican Missal and the Book of Common Prayer. The Supplemental Texts follow a similar philosophy, with traditional English texts used throughout. The inclusion of the Creed of St. Athanasius is a welcome one. Before adopting Divine Worship: Daily Office, I had never read the Creed of St. Athanasius. For most Roman Catholics, we know the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed. Yet the Athanasian Creed is precise and surgical when explaining the Catholic faith. It is said on the “red letter days” from the Book of Common Prayer, as well as every Sunday at the office of Prime. The Litany from the Book of Common Prayer is also included, to be recited on Rogation Days. The Occasional Prayers and Thanksgivings again is a collection of prayers taken from Anglican sources, to be used in the saying of the Daily Office. I love the prayer for the Pope found in this section.

    The Ordinary of the Divine Office is the section that forms the core of Divine Worship: Daily Office. Divine Worship: Daily Office consists of seven hours: Mattins (Morning Prayer), Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Evensong (Evening Prayer), and Compline. In further posts, I will detail how to pray these hours. I will go into more detail about the Ordinary then. The Ordinary is the part of Divine Worship: Daily Office that never changes. You will always be flipping back to this section when you pray. Following the Ordinary is the Psalter. Divine Worship: Daily Office utilizes the Coverdale Psalter, the same one employed by the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. It is, in my opinion, the most beautiful translation of the Psalms into English, even beating out the King James Psalms. The Psalter of Divine Worship: Daily Office is a 30-day cycle that covers all of the Psalms. Unlike the modern-day Liturgy of the Hours, which omits Psalms 58, 83, and 109 because they are considered “difficult,” Divine Worship: Daily Office features the complete Psalter of David. 

    The lessons of Divine Worship: Daily Office are a modified version of the lessons used by the Church of England in the 1960s. These lessons are the peak Liturgical Movement and have a two-year cycle for Sundays and a one-year cycle for weekdays. The translation employed is the Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition, 2nd Edition. This is the same translation used in the Ignatius Press Study Bible, the Great Adventure Bible, and the Bible In a Year Podcast with Fr. Mike Schmitz. The history of the Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition, 2nd Edition is too long to get into here, but it is the best modern Catholic translation of the Bible. You can use any translation with Divine Worship: Daily Office. 

    The last section of Divine Worship: Daily Office is the Appendices. This section contains a variety of goodies, such as devotions for before and after Mass, the Seven Penitential Psalms, the Itinerary (prayers before traveling), blessings for various objects, an examination of conscience for Priests, the rite of Benediction, and brief formulæ for the sacraments in case of emergencies. This section is mainly geared towards priests, but lay people such as myself find it useful too. 

    I hope this post is a good “get to know you” primer on what is inside Divine Worship: Daily Office. I will post further on how to pray Mattins and Evensong soon, as well as how to add complexity. Learning a new Brevairy is a process, so do not be afraid to take your time. May all the Saints of England pray for us, Amen.

Daily Office Part 0: Introduction

    This is the start of the first “series” on this blog. My goal is to write a series of articles on a specific topic, and then intersperse some miscellaneous postings between them. I decided that the first series would be a how-to on Divine Worship: Daily Office, which is the breviary used by clergy of the Anglican Ordinariates in the Roman Catholic Church. This is obscure Catholicism at its finest; however, this book is simply amazing. It has been my default method of praying the Hours for the past two years. a good breviary for Traditional Catholics who want to pray an Office rooted in the Tradition of the Church, but for whatever reason cannot pray with the 1962 Breviary. It also offers a nice hybrid of both the new and old liturgical calendars. For example, Ember Days and the Feast of St. John Paul II are both included in this book. Now, the story of what Divine Worship: Daily Office is and how it came to be in itself warrants a whole post, and will make explaining how to pray with this book a little easier. I apologise if this first part in the series is very heavy on the history, the next part will get into the nitty gritty of the book itself. So without further ado, let's get started.

    The Church of England (and by extension the other Anglican churches of the Anglosphere) has always had its little factions. In the 1500s, there were the Catholic loyalists, led by St. Thomas More, who sought to preserve the Church in England, and the Tudor loyalists, who wanted to reform English Christianity into the Church of England. In the 1600s, there were the Puritans and Laudians, and in the 1800s, there was the Oxford movement and the Ritualists versus the Evangelicals. In the 1900s, the Anglican Communion once again split itself into factions. Starting in the mid-1970s, the Episcopal Church and Church of England began to admit women to the sacrament of Holy Orders. Combined with this blatant disregard of church tradition, the Anglican bishops decided to abandon liturgical tradition and adopt the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which abandoned the sacral English and classical æsthetics for a “spirit of Vatican II” order of service, which is devoid of all the Anglican beauty. These two decisions prompted the more conservative Anglo-Catholic factions of the Episcopal Church and the Church of England to split off starting in 1977. These schisms resulted in a dozen or so “continuing Anglican Churches”. These groups were Anglo-Catholic in liturgy, using the Anglican Missal (the Tridentine Mass in English with the option to use Dr. Cranmer’s prayer of consecration instead of the Roman Canon), the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. They were also conservative on social issues, being against women’s ordination, gay marriage, and abortion. Individual clergy of the Episcopal Church had begun to enter into communion with the See of Rome through the Pastoral Provision, which was set up by St. John Paul II as a way to allow married Anglican clerics to be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church. A few personal parishes were established for former Anglicans through the Pastoral Provision, most famously Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio, Texas. These parishes used a hybrid of the Book of Common Prayer and the 1969 Missal. However, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were rumblings within the “continuing Anglican” churches. Some vocal members began to push for full corporate reunion with the Roman Catholic Church, following the precedent set forth by the Uniate Eastern Churches. One group, the Traditional Anglican Communion, sent groups to petition the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They followed these petitions up with the “Portsmouth Letter” in October of 2007. They requested to “seek as a body full and visible communion, particularly eucharistic communion, in Christ, with the Roman Catholic Church, in which it recognises the fullest subsistence of Christ’s one Church” (Portsmouth Letter). They also sought to “achieve such communion while maintaining those revered traditions of spirituality, liturgy, discipline and theology that constitute the cherished and centuries-old heritage of Anglican communities throughout the world” (Portsmouth Letter). The Vatican studied the letter, and in the fall of 2009, Pope Benedict gave his response.

    On November 4, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI promulgated the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Cœtibus. This document established personal ordinariates. These function similarly to dioceses, with the key difference being that they are run by an ordinary, who can either be a priest or a bishop. Membership in these personal ordinariates would only be open to former Anglicans. Former Anglican Parishes could seek to corporately enter the Roman Catholic Church, letting them keep their property, pastor, and traditions. In a weird piece of historical trivia, Mt. Calvary Episcopal Church, which was the parish Gen. Robert E. Lee attended when he lived in Baltimore, chose to join the Roman Catholic Church this way. Finally, these personal ordinariates would be tasked with the mission “to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church” (Anglicanorum Cœtibus, III). Furthermore, Anglicanorum Cœtibus describes the liturgy of the Anglican Communion as a “treasure to be shared” (Anglicanorum Cœtibus, III). On January 11, 2011, the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was established, covering England and Wales. On January 1, 2012, the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter was established, covering the United States and Canada. Finally, on June 12, 2012, the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross was established, covering Australasia and Japan.

    Keeping in line with Anglicanorum Cœtibus, work immediately began to bring Anglican Liturgical customs into the life of the Catholic Church. On November 29, 2015, Divine Worship: The Missal was released. Divine Worship: The Missal (also known as the Anglican Use or Anglican Rite) is a combination of the Tridentine Mass in English with the Book of Common Prayer, with the three-year lectionary. The language is quite beautiful, and the intrusions from the 1969 Missal are very minimal. We will not focus on Divine Worship: The Missal today, however, I may return to it sometime soon. In June of 2021, Divine Worship: Daily Office was released. It was based on the Book of Common Prayer, and has two editions, one for the Commonwealth Countries, based on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and one for North America, based on the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the 1962 Book of Common Prayer. I own the Commonwealth Edition, as the North American Edition is always out of stock. This series will focus on the Commonwealth Edition, but it will work for the North American Edition as well.

    So why did I tell you this? Because the stories behind our liturgies matter. The Anglican Use is just that, Anglican. It is Anglican in union with the See of Sts. Peter and Paul. Just as the Uniate Eastern Church was not mandated to give anything up when they reëntered full communion with Rome, so too are Anglicans, who were invited by the Church to preserve and celebrate their traditions. My goal is to teach you how to use Divine Worship: Daily Office. However, my goal is also to introduce you to another legitimate tradition that sits among the Maronite, Greek, Chaldean, and Roman as an expression of the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith.

An Introduction

    Hello, my name is Walter. After some encouragement from some of my teachers, I thought it would be interesting to share my passions and thoughts with the vast expanse of the internet. I will aim to be semi-consistent with the range of topics I write about. Expect to hear my opinions on Catholicism (and Christianity more generally), culture, history, and politics. I write whenever I feel like it, so apologies if you enjoy my writing and want more of it; this is just a hobby for me. Over time, I may write more consistently if there is demand. I want to build a community here around the topics discussed in this publication, and part of a true Christian community is "persevering in the doctrine of the apostles, and in the communication of the breaking of bread, and in prayers" (Acts. 2:42, Douay-Rheims). I hope to help build an authentic Catholic community based on this verse.

    I will also share a bit about my background. I was born and raised in the Midwestern United States (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio). I am a Catholic who falls into the categories of juridically Roman, patrimonially Anglican, and spiritually Ignatian. First, juridically Roman. I am a member of the Roman Catholic Church. I am subject to a Roman Catholic Archbishop and his jurisdiction. Second, patrimonially Anglican. I have a great devotion to the Anglican liturgical patrimony, both Oxford Movement and Laudian. I attend the Tridentine Mass in Latin and have a great attachment to that liturgy. Finally, spiritually Ignatian. I attended a Jesuit Academy and a Jesuit High School. I love the Society of Jesus (even with their imperfections and errors), and St. Ignatius of Loyola is one of my three patrons. I hope to write about these three things in the future.

    Some non-negotiables. One, I accept Pope Leo XIV as the reigning pontiff. Two, the Second Vatican Council is the 21st Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church. Three, the 1969 Missal and Liturgical Books are valid.

    

    I hope this introductory post provides a bit more clarity on what I intend this place to be. Hopefully, you, the reader, will assist me in building something beautiful. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam!