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December 14, 2020(Editor's note: Peter Smith is the vice-president of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society. The opinions here represent his personal views alone, and are not the official position of the ACS.)
Divine Worship: Daily Office has already sold out of the North American edition’s first print run, and a second print run is already in the works to meet the high pre-order demand before the Office is publicly listed for sale by Newman House Press. The initial response alone shows the Ordinariate’s parish communities and members have signaled a strong resonance with Bishop Steven Lopes’s vision that the Daily Offices should be a “regular feature of Ordinariate life.”
The Ordinariate’s Divine Worship: Daily Office has demand from three key audiences which a second print run will have to meet: the approx. 40 U.S. and Canadian Ordinariate parish communities themselves in North America, the Catholics of the Anglican tradition outside of those Ordinariate parishes, and the wider sphere of English-speaking Roman Catholics. This latter group now has an option now to pray the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours with an affordable, single-volume Daily Office (used in conjunction with one’s Bible) that is in traditional Prayer Book English and organized in a straightforward way for prayer.
Newman House Press’s second print run of Divine Worship: Daily Office provides Ordinariate parish communities a critical opportunity window to create “strategic depth” in the parish culture for praying the Daily Office, which is the public prayer of the Catholic Church. By this, I mean that not only is a parish equipping itself with enough books for public liturgy, but it is also getting the Daily Office into the hands of as many of its congregants as possible, so they are praying it through the week at home, fulfilling both the Ordinariate’s Anglican charism and the Second Vatican Council’s teaching.
Bishop Lopes also clearly envisions Ordinariate parish life will fully live out its Anglican tradition and the Second Vatican Council’s vision of public prayer in the parish. And thankfully, the Ordinariate is a Catholic diocese already well-primed to do this.
One of the beautiful treasures of the Anglican tradition is that the Book of Common Prayer put the Daily Office of the Liturgy of the Hours into the hands of the Christian faithful and provided a framework for routinely opening their Bible for their sanctification that the Second Vatican Council would affirm for the universal Church 400 years later. Divine Worship: Daily Office, which has a rich emphasis on Sacred Scripture, beautifully fulfills what the Council taught on the praying of the Office and the Bible. Regarding the Office, the Council teaches in Sacrosanctum concilium, “Pastors of souls should see to it that the chief hours, especially Vespers, are celebrated in common in church on Sundays and the more solemn feasts. And the laity, too, are encouraged to recite the divine office, either with the priests, or among themselves, or even individually." And in Dei verbum, the Council “earnestly and especially urges all the Christian faithful, especially Religious, to learn by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures the "excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ" … And let them remember that prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture, so that God and man may talk together; for ‘we speak to Him when we pray; we hear Him when we read the divine saying.’”
“[R]emember, one of the particular insights that arose in the Anglican tradition is that the Office is the prayer of the parish. It's the prayer of the whole parish: the clergy, but also the lay faithful,” he told the National Catholic Register in an interview on the Daily Office. “And so this tradition that Morning and Evening Prayer would be prayed publicly in church is a regular feature of that parish life, and should become again a regular feature of Ordinariate life.”
Bringing the Daily Office Home
However, key to creating the parish culture of praying the Daily Office is making the culture take root in the home, the domestic church, which is the primary school of prayer. The more people who are praying at home or with others outside of church means more people who are already formed to pray Mattins or Evensong as part of the church’s regular liturgical life. Since a lay person can lead the Daily Office, this creates the possibility of having a steady, rich liturgical life through the week at the parish beyond the Mass.
Ordinariate parishes can create this strategic depth through adopting a “buy-in” strategy. In addition to placing their own order of Divine Worship: Daily Office for liturgical use, Ordinariate parishes could invite their parish members to join the bulk order by ordering their own personal copies at NHP’s discounted bulk rates. [My own Ordinariate parish did this with a Flocknote and paper signup, and we discovered a very strong response]. The parishioners who sign up are already an immediate audience for the parish to hold classes, either in-person or via Zoom, to teach the faithful how to pray with Divine Worship: Daily Office. And the discounted rate also means a parish community is reducing cost as a barrier to some families.
Prayer has its own language (the Catechism of the Catholic Church expounds this beautifully in
CCC 2262 and following); but the success of any language is whether it is spoken in the home. Two key analogous examples come to mind: the Israelis succeeded in resurrecting Hebrew as a spoken vernacular after a 2,500 year hiatus precisely by making sure that it was spoken in the home and not just in school. The Irish, by contrast, are steadily losing Irish Gaelic, which is taught in school, but is not spoken at home. The home is key to reviving or sustaining the language in the community.
Likewise in the Ordinariate, having the Daily Office prayed in the home is key to sustaining the parish culture of common liturgical prayer at Mattins and Evensong. While the St. Gregory’s Prayer Book is a valuable (and highly recommended) book of devotions to enrich one’s spiritual life, it is private devotional prayer and no replacement for the Daily Office, which is the Church’s public liturgical prayer. The Daily Office is foundational for Anglican spirituality in the Catholic Church, and fulfills the Second Vatican Council’s vision for the laity’s sanctification as well.
The Ordinariate’s Catholic laity, no less than the obligated clergy, need Divine Worship: Daily Office as the mainstay of prayer through the week to grow in holiness. And the more this culture of the Daily Office takes root, the more an Ordinariate parish will see its Catholic faithful primed to carry out their vocation of missionary discipleship and ecumenical outreach following the call of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Photo: Choral Mattins procession at St. Michael's cathedral, Toronto, at the ACS 2019 Conference on the Anglican Tradition in the Catholic Church. In-set photos courtesy of St. Alban's Catholic Church in Rochester, NY.
