The Plug-and-Pray Office
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    Reality: the collective prayer life of the Roman Catholic Church has been blown to smithereens.

    Aside from the Mass (which the majority of Catholics do not even attend regularly), virtually no lay Catholics pray a collective office. When I suggest praying the Little Hours to young people where I work, I get blank stares. They've heard of Vespers, but they think it's something priests do.

    For Morning Prayer, the Little Hours, and Vespers ever to become routine in the life of the English-speaking Roman Catholic laity, someone needs to produce ready-to-print booklets in PDF with everything included (music, text, rubrics) for every day of the liturgical year. It is absurd to expect working Catholics to pursue all these liturgical minutiae on their own and to duplicate efforts elsewhere.

    Start with the 1st Sunday in Advent and post the booklets online. Start with Vespers. Continue to complete a Sunday cycle, and then move to (say) a First Friday cycle.

    1. Everything for traditional Vespers in Latin is done. All that's necessary is to integrate the components from the LU into booklets. (It should also be possible to do such a traditional Vespers in English. I would like to know how that could best be done, starting with 1 Sunday Advent.)

    2. If I'm not mistaken, Mundelein Seminary has produced everything necessary to do LotH "Evening Prayer" in English with new chant tones. It's called the Mundelein Psalter. It should also be possible to do LotH Evening Prayer in Latin, though I'm not sure what the point of that would be.

    There is no good reason this cannot be done.

    Of course, we laity can invent pretty much anything we want for prayer services, making us functionally more like Congregationalists than Roman Catholics. If that kind of isolation is what you want, knock yourself out. If not, we are going to have to use the internet and new publishing techniques to pull this business together.
  • Felipe Gasper
    Posts: 804
    http://www.ebreviary.com

    But, it’s a paid subscription service.
  • Charles in CenCA
    Posts: 2,416
    This doesn't cost:

    http://www.universalis.com/20081020/today.htm
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    Needs music. Printable booklet. Download. Ready to go.
  • Michael O'Connor
    Posts: 1,637
    There's also www.breviary.net
  • Hugh
    Posts: 198
    For what it's worth, I've been working away at something like this the last few months. We often have sung traditional vespers here at St Aloysius, Caulfield, and I'm impatient of reinventing the wheel for every service. So I've bitten the bullet and committed myself to a preparing (for starters) a complete Vespers service - with translations, for the whole year.

    St Meinrad fonts set out in MS Word with the words at 14 point font and music at 48 points.

    First stage is the psalm/magnificat tones. There are about 330 for Vespers, of which I've so far knocked off about 235.

    As an example - the tones for Dixit Dominus, go to the very bottom of my home page here [www.fidelitybooks.com.au/Hugh] for the pdf version http://www.fidelitybooks.com.au/Hugh/DixitDominusAlltones.pdf and for the .doc [ http://www.fidelitybooks.com.au/Hugh/DixitDominusAlltones.doc ]

    Naturally, you'll need St Meinrad to view the .doc version.

    [Yet to be finally proofed]

    I've also converted each tone setting to a tif file. Ready to import into Publisher, which is where I would be laying out the final version.

    Next stage is to point all the psalms for vespers according as each tone & ending requires. Then to put the translations in. This is to be done in Publisher in table rows and columns, and for an analogy, see the point psalmody with line by line translation of the tenebrae pdf booklets I've done at the same site.

    Then the antiphons and their translations.

    Then the collects, preces, etc.

    Then (I'm still thinking about this) putting the whole thing in a system so one can easily customise according to the Sunday/Feast/ one needs to prepare.

    Of course, once one has done the first year's work, other years become that much simpler to prepare. (Eg. the Sunday vespers.)

    Anyway, this will probably take about the next 6 months or so in my free time.

    Any suggestions welcome.

    I'm calling it phase one of my "Electronic Liber" project. It may be my Unfinished.

    Hugh Henry
    Melbourne
  • a1437053a1437053
    Posts: 198
    Universalis has the ENTIRE LotH in English available as an iPhone/iPod application!

    I'd have it on my iPod, but it is different from the "Christian Prayer" here in the U.S.

    Imagine, the entire thing for about $30.00US . . . unfortunately for us in the U.S., last I checked, they only offer the U.K. approved translations.

    Questions:
    Why are the translations different in both countries?
    Will the vote this week on the Psalter help change this?

    You can download and buy Universalis for the iPhone from the iPhone App Store. Visit the store to see the exact price, which will be around £20 / $40. There is no annual subscription: once you have bought a licence, you can use Universalis for ever. When updates are needed, they will be available free of charge.


    http://www.universalis.com/-800/n-download-iPhone.htm
  • a1437053a1437053
    Posts: 198
    One more thought: imagine Universalis' text somehow linked to an mp3 file for those of us who are less "musically inclined"? THAT would be easy for us to SING! All on the iPod!
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,160
    Universalis actually commissioned their own psalm translation. (See their FAQ page.) They probably couldn't get permission to publish any of the officially approved versions - at least not without paying some fee.

    The UK/Ireland/Australia Divine Office varies in several ways from the ICEL LoTH edition used in the US and some other countries. In general, it preserves familiar religious language ("Glory be to the Father..."), it is inclined toward brevity ("My soul glorifies the Lord...") and is much more singable.

    Latin: Pax Christi exsultet in cordibus vestris, alleluia. (1st Vespers of Easter IV Sunday)
    ICEL: May the peace of Christ full your hearts with joy, alleluia.
    UK: May the peace of Christ reign in your hearts, alleluia.

    Latin: Salva nos, Domine, vigilantes; custodi nos dormientes, ut vigilemus cum Christo et requiescamus in pace. (Compline antiphon)
    ICEL: Protect us, Lord, as we stay awake, watch over us as we sleep, that awake, we may keep watch with Christ, and asleep, rest in his peace.
    UK: Save us, Lord, while we are awake; protect us while we sleep; that we may keep watch with Christ and rest with him in peace.


    The UK edition selects scripture texts from the Jerusalem Bible and other versions.

    Both use the 1963 Grail psalms.
    Of course the UK Office does not have the ICEL-invented "psalm prayers".
  • a1437053a1437053
    Posts: 198
    chonak: Great explanation. Thanks.
  • TBL
    Posts: 13
    Pes--

    Is this something like what you are thinking of in the first post? It's a (very) rough draft and still missing a couple things... our Newman Club in school actually prayed traditional Compline together, and we made a similar full Latin-English booklet for the entire year of Compline, though without music.

    In my experience: to be useful, a booklet of traditional Vespers would need vernacular translations of at least the psalter, if not the whole thing -- people want to know what they're praying, and those comfortable enough to pray the office entirely without needing English notes mostly already do (and with their own breviaries :-) ).
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    TBL

    Wonderful. Yes, that's what I mean as far as booklets go, but it's important I think to agree on a common typesetting standard. Getting out of the font-based music business would be ideal because it would mean no one would ever have to enter the musical data ever again. In the meantime, however, establishing some sort of on-line scriptorium, with a common font, a common (Word?) document platform, and common booklet template, would enable all of us to divide the labor and get the entire thing done. I like your booklet's format, though I think an 8.5 x 11 folded-in-half booklet (I don't know the proper term -- folio, maybe?) would be most economical. Maybe legal size would be better; I'm not an expert in this area. Perhaps Richard Rice could produce a template in Word that we all could then use. Then it would be a matter of distributed scribal work. A small group of editors could then review drafts before posting them in the "approved" area for download.
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