Liturgy of the Hours
The Liturgy of the Hours, Divine Office, or Opus Dei is a set of Catholic prayers comprising the canonical hours, often also referred to as the breviary, of the Latin Church. The Liturgy of the Hours forms the official set of prayers "marking the hours of each day and sanctifying the day with prayer." The term "Liturgy of the Hours" has been retroactively applied to the practices of saying the canonical hours in both the Christian East and West–particularly within the Latin liturgical rites–prior to the Second Vatican Council, and is the official term for the canonical hours promulgated for usage by the Latin Church in 1971. Before 1971, the official form for the Latin Church was the Breviarium Romanum, first published in 1568 with major editions through 1962.
The Liturgy of the Hours, like many other forms of the canonical hours, consists primarily of psalms supplemented by hymns, readings, and other prayers and antiphons prayed at fixed prayer times. Together with the Mass, it constitutes the public prayer of the church. Christians of both Western and Eastern traditions celebrate the canonical hours in various forms and under various names. The chant or recitation of the Divine Office therefore forms the basis of prayer within the consecrated life, with some of the monastic or mendicant orders producing their own permutations of the Liturgy of the Hours and older Roman Breviary.
Prayer of the Divine Office is an obligation undertaken by priests and deacons intending to become priests, while deacons intending to remain deacons are obliged to recite only a part. The constitutions of religious institutes generally oblige their members to celebrate at least parts and in some cases to do so jointly. Consecrated virgins take the duty to celebrate the liturgy of hours with the rite of consecration. Within the Latin Church, the faithful "are encouraged to recite the divine office, either with the priests, or among themselves, or even individually", though there is no obligation for them to do so. The laity may oblige themselves to pray the Liturgy of the Hours or part of it by a personal vow.
The present official form of the entire Liturgy of the Hours of the Roman Rite is that contained in the four-volume Latin-language publication Liturgia Horarum, the first edition of which appeared in 1971. English and other vernacular translations were soon produced and were made official for their territories by the competent episcopal conferences. For Catholics in primarily Commonwealth nations, the three-volume Divine Office, which uses a range of different English Bibles for the readings from Scripture, was published in 1974. The four-volume Liturgy of the Hours, with Scripture readings from the New American Bible, appeared in 1975 with approval from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The 1989 English translation of the Ceremonial of Bishops includes in Part III instructions on the Liturgy of the Hours which the bishop presides, for example the vesper on major solemnities.
Origins
The General Instruction of the Liturgy of Hours in the Roman Rite states: "The public and communal prayer of the people of God is rightly considered among the first duties of the Church. From the very beginning the baptized 'remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers'. Many times the Acts of the Apostles testifies that the Christian community prayed together. The testimony of the early Church shows that individual faithful also devoted themselves to prayer at certain hours. In various areas the practice soon gained ground of devoting special times to prayer in common."Early Christians were in fact continuing the Jewish practice of reciting prayers at certain hours of the day or night. In the Psalms are found expressions like "in the morning I offer you my prayer"; "At midnight I will rise and thank you"; "Evening, morning and at noon I will cry and lament"; "Seven times a day I praise you". The Apostles observed the Jewish custom of praying at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, and at midnight. Hence the practice of seven fixed prayer times has been taught from the time of the early Church; in Apostolic Tradition, Hippolytus instructed Christians to pray seven times a day "on rising, at the lighting of the evening lamp, at bedtime, at midnight" and "the third, sixth and ninth hours of the day, being hours associated with Christ's Passion."
The Christian prayer of that time consisted of almost the same elements as the Jewish: recital or chanting of psalms and reading of the Old Testament, to which were soon added readings of the Gospels, Acts, and epistles, and canticles. Other elements were added later in the course of the centuries.
Historical development
Early church
In Roman cities, the bell in the forum rang the beginning of the business day at about six o'clock in the morning, noted the day's progress by striking again at about nine o'clock in the morning, tolled for the lunch break at noon, called the people back to work again at about three o'clock in the afternoon, and rang the close of the business day at about six o'clock in the evening.The healing of the crippled man at the temple gate occurred as Peter and John were going to the temple to pray at the "ninth hour" of prayer. The decision to include Gentiles among the community of believers, arose from a vision Peter had while praying at noontime, the "sixth hour".
The early church was known to pray the Psalms, which have remained a part of the canonical hours. By 60 AD, the Didache recommended disciples to pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day; this practice found its way into the canonical hours as well. Pliny the Younger, mentions not only fixed times of prayer by believers, but also specific services – other than the Eucharist – assigned to those times: "they met on a stated day before it was light, and addressed a form of prayer to Christ, as to a divinity, … after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble, to eat in common a harmless meal."
By the second and third centuries, such Church Fathers as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian wrote of the practice of Morning and Evening Prayer, and of the prayers at terce, sext, and none. Daily morning and evening prayer preceded daily Mass, for the Mass was first limited to Sundays and then gradually spread to some feast days. The daily prayer kept alive the theme of gratitude from the Sunday "Eucharist". The prayers could be prayed individually or in groups. By the third century, the Desert Fathers began to live out Paul's command to "pray without ceasing" by having one group of monks pray one fixed-hour prayer while having another group pray the next prayer.
Middle Ages
As the format of unbroken fixed-hour prayer developed in the Christian monastic communities in the East and West, longer prayers soon grew, but the cycle of prayer became the norm in daily life in monasteries. By the fourth century, the characteristics of the canonical hours more or less took their present shape. For secular clergymen and lay people, the fixed-hour prayers were by necessity much shorter. In many churches and basilicas staffed by monks, the form of the fixed-hour prayers was a hybrid of secular and monastic practice.In the East, the development of the Divine Services shifted from the area around Jerusalem to Constantinople. In particular, Theodore the Studite combined a number of influences from the Byzantine court ritual with monastic practices common in Asia Minor, and added thereto a number of hymns composed by himself and his brother Joseph.
In the West, the Rule of Saint Benedict modeled his guidelines for the prayers on the customs of the basilicas of Rome. It was he who expounded the concept in Christian prayer of the inseparability of the spiritual life from the physical life. The Benedictines began to call the prayers the Opus Dei or "Work of God."
As the Divine Office grew more important in the life of the church, the rituals became more elaborate. Soon, praying the Office began to require various books, such as a psalter for the psalms, a lectionary to find the assigned scripture reading for the day, a Bible to proclaim the reading, a hymnal for singing, etc. As parishes grew in the Middle Ages away from cathedrals and basilicas, a more concise way of arranging the hours was needed. So, a sort of list developed called the Breviary, which gave the format of the daily office and the texts to be used.
The spread of breviaries eventually reached Rome, where Pope Innocent III extended its use to the Roman Curia. The Franciscans sought a one-volume breviary for its friars to use during travels, so the order adopted the Breviarium Curiae, but substituting the Gallican Psalter for the Roman. The Franciscans gradually spread this breviary throughout Europe. Pope Nicholas III would then adopt the widely used Franciscan breviary to be the breviary used in Rome. By the 14th century, the breviary contained the entire text of the canonical hours.
Revision by Pope Pius V
The Council of Trent, at its final session on 4 December 1563, entrusted the reform of the breviary to the then pope, Pius IV. On 9 July 1568, Pope Pius V, the successor to Pius IV who closed the Council of Trent, promulgated an edition, known as the Roman Breviary, with his Apostolic Constitution Quod a nobis, imposing it in the same way in which, two years later, he imposed his Roman Missal and using language very similar to that in the bull Quo primum with which he promulgated the Missal.With the same bull, Pius V ordered the general abolition of all breviaries other than his reformed breviary, with the same exception that he was to make in his Quo primum bull: he allowed those legitimately in use for at least 200 years to continue. Examples of such breviaries are the Benedictine, the Carmelite, the Carthusian, the Dominican, the Premonstratensian, and the Ambrosian.
St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, along with the four churches under its jurisdiction, retained its own unique liturgies, psalms, and Latin translations into the 19th century. Many other churches whose local rites predated Pius V's breviary by 200 years or more, such as that of Mantua, continued to use their own breviaries, liturgical calendars, and psalms, as well.