Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The Roman Breviary

For many years I have had a vague notion of what the Roman Breviary was like, but have never looked at one. Now I find that there is a site for the Roman Breviary, run by The Confraternity of Ss. Peter and Paul, who, judging from their "abhorrence" of the liturgical reforms of Pius XII, etc., are somehow affiliated with the SSPX. You have to sign up as a member to see the Breviary itself, but there are some open resources that are quite interesting, such as the Roman Martyrology and a commentary on the Breviary by Pius Parsch. The Breviary used is the 1911 edition. It includes an English translation. Since I didn't want to sign up as a member, I don't know the quality of the English, but I presume it is pretty archaic.

I realize now that I had some misconceptions about the reform of the Divine Office. For instance, there were OT canticles in the old office. And there were petitions--better ones, in my mind, than the ones we have now, which sometimes seem more like mini-homilies.

I should that the current preces are very inspirational and spiritually rich. And I don't mind praying them for my interior and the Churches renewal, but I do a so like to pray for ordinary, external things, too, which the old prayers did. I know that there are alternative petitions in EP that are more like the older ones, but they aren't in the one-volume versions.

Here is the web site.

I wonder if there is a similar site for the official Extraordinary Form Breviary?

1 comment:

Bill White said...

I thought breviary.net was run by the folks at St Gertrude in Cincinnati, who consider the SSPX to be a bunch of dope-smoking New Age liberal clown-Mass hippies, relatively speaking.

You might be interested in the Bute breviary, a private translation of the pre-Pius X breviary (see archive.org), and there's also http://divinumofficium.com/cgi-bin/horas/officium.pl, where the 1961 breviary is one of many options.

Cheers -

bw