Showing posts with label Ordo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ordo. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Getting ready for Advent pt 2

In my last post I suggested starting to get ready for Advent now, as it is a  particularly intensive time in the Office.

In this post, I want to continue on that theme, and highlight some of the key things you need to be aware of or remind yourself of.

The two parts of Advent

First, Advent essentially falls into two parts - the days up to and including December 16, which are Class III days; and the days between December 17 and 23, which are Class II.

First, throughout both parts of Advent, the 'Ordinary of Advent' is used, so make sure you are familiar with what is in it!

Aside from the Ordinary, it is important to keep in mind that unlike Lent and some other special seasons, the default collect throughout Advent is that of the Sunday of the relevant week of Advent, not of the day.  The exceptions are for feasts, the Ember Days of Advent, and the Vigil of the Nativity.

Thirdly, unlike Lent, Class III feasts are not reduced to commemorations.  Instead, when a feast occurs, the Advent day is 'commemorated' at both Lauds and Vespers, by using the canticle antiphon for the relevant hour and day of Advent, the versicle for Lauds or Vespers which is of the season, and the collect (of the Advent week).  You can find more detailed notes on this here: how to make commemorations of the Advent day

Fourthly, there are canticle antiphons for each day of Advent.  During the first part of Advent, these are of the day of the Advent week.  This pattern continues for Lauds during the second part of Advent, with the exception of two antiphons that are specific to the date (21 and 23 December), but at Vespers, the (O) antiphons are of the date for December 17 to 23.

Finally, when it comes to the antiphons for the psalms, during the first part of Advent, Prime to None use the antiphons of the relevant Advent Sunday.  When the days are Class II, there are specific special  antiphons for each day of the week.  If you want to know more about antiphons, and particularly singing them, try these two posts: Antiphons in Advent Pt 1 and Antiphons Pt 2.

Want to know more?

For those wanting to know more, or needing more help, you can either get a full Ordo from Lulu, use the shorter notes on the Ordo page on this blog, and/or refer to the notes I've previously written on this topic.

For notes on the individual hours in advent, follow these links:

And for quick reference guides with page numbers to the Diurnal try these links:

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Getting ready for Advent - Part I

This is my annual reminder that the most complicated time of the year for the Office, Advent, is rapidly approaching, so its time to start getting ready!

This post is primarily for those relatively new to the Office - I'll say more for those more advanced in the next.

Get your Ordo now




The first key step is to make sure you have an Ordo at hand that you can use.

At a minimum, an Ordo will tell you what liturgical day is celebrated on each date, and how to resolve any conflicts between competing days and feasts (such as between Sundays and feasts, or competing days and dates in Advent).

Each year, the changing dates of  'moveable feasts' and seasons (stemming from the date of the first Sunday of Advent and Easter) interact with the calendar year cycle causing what the Diurnal calls occasions of  'concurrence' or 'occurence'.  

For the coming year, I've found  over sixty of these, and nine of these occur in December.

You can of course, sit down and work these out for yourself with the aid of the 'two tables' in the Diurnal, and a copy of the rubrics (since there are always some issues that aren't actually covered by the two tables).  But you will need to have your wits about you if you choose that path!

A short version of the one I produce can be found at the page links on this blog - click here for December. Alternatively you can purchase a more detailed version which tells you exactly which texts you should use, and providing page numbers for them in the Diurnal and Antiphonale (if you are chanting the Office).

You can purchase it Lulu: 


Make sure you know the structure of the hours thoroughly

Secondly, make sure you are very familiar with the different parts that make up each hour.

In the period of the calendar we are currently in, time after Pentecost, most of the texts you need, Sundays aside, can be found either in the psalter section of your Diurnal, supplemented by the section for feasts of saints.

During Advent, however, a lot of the texts in the psalter section are replaced by others, and on some days they may come from several different places.

If you get a copy of the Ordo, you will find summaries of the structure of the day hours there, or you can consult the notes on the Learn the Benedictine Office blog.

Make sure you are familiar with the Ordinary of Advent and where it slots in

The particular challenge for Advent is that the texts for the hours are a mix of the Ordinary of Advent'; psalm antiphons for the week or day of the week in the period 17-23 December; and canticle antiphons for the day of the Advent week and/or date.  

And that's before taking into account some the feasts that fall in Advent, which usually require a 'commemoration' of the Advent day.

I would also suggest looking now at the section of the Diurnal with the 'Ordinary of Advent' (MD 9*), near the beginning of the Diurnal, and making sure you know where to substitute in these texts.

Start learning/revising the chants!

Finally, the Office is meant to be sung!

If you are new to chant, it is best to start slowly, but it is pretty easy to learn at least one or two of the hymns.

A very useful site for this purpose, is called Liber Hymnarius - you can find the file for the Vespers hymn, Conditor alme siderum) here. The words for the last two verses are different to the Benedictine Office version, but the rest aligns, and should be enough to get you going!

More anon.


Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Getting ready for Advent Part 2A - Reading an Ordo, Pt 1

Today, the second part in my series on getting ready for Advent.

This post and the next are also by way of general preparation for the incoming Ordos for the new liturgical year, since they look at how to use an Ordo effectively. 

Alerting you to go look...


Ordos work by providing an alert to you, a reminder that you need to look at a part of your book other than the psalter section.

For First Vespers of Advent for example, this year on Saturday 2 December, the Le Barroux Ordo says ' - Vesp. de Dom. seq.', meaning Vespers of the following Sunday.

This means you need to look in the 'temporale' or 'of time' section of your book to see what is there by way of instructions for 1 Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent. 

Names of feasts and Offices - and finding them in older books


The Ordo I provide on this blog generally goes a couple of steps further.

First, for Saturdays and 1 Vespers of major feasts, I generally try to include a more detailed reference to the relevant Office you are looking for, such as '1 Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent'.  

This meant to be a reminder that the texts will not all be of the relevant day of the week.

It is also intended to aid those using other/older books for whom the page numbers I provide won't line up.  

And it provides a cross-check in case there is an error in the page references I've provided!

Note though, that feasts and Offices can masquerade under different names in different books.  

While I generally describe Saturday Vespers as I Vespers of the Sunday, for example, consistent with the 1962 breviary, some older books describe it is as 'Sabbato ante Dominicam 1. Adventus' (Saturday before the First Sunday of Advent), and continue this convention throughout the year.

Accordingly, you need to become familiar with the terminology of the particular Office book you are using, and work out how it translates to whatever Ordo you are using.

Using the page numbering systems as a cue


I also provide page numbers for the relevant sections of the Monastic Diurnale and the Antiphonale Monasticum.

As I noted in my previous post, the page numbering systems employed by the Diurnal (and the page sections in the Antiphonale) give you a cue as to what section of the book you need to look in to find the relevant text.

Imagine you are using an older breviary, for example, and are looking for the feast of St John the Evangelist (December 27).

In principle this could appear in the sanctorale (it is after all the feast of a saint).  

In fact however it is normally placed in the temporale with the rest of the feasts of the Christmas octave.

If you didn't know this you could work it out by looking at the numbering system used for the Monastic Diurnal reference.  For Lauds, for example, the entry will be:

Lauds: Festal psalms with antiphons, chapter, responsory, hymn, versicle, Benedictus antiphon and collect of the feast, with a commemoration of the Octave, MD 90*/AM 255 ff.

The MD entry - number+ asterix  - tells you it is in the temporale section of the book.

Missing feasts


It is also worth noting that if you are using an older breviary, some feasts of the 1962 calendar may not be there at all (such as Christ the King, for books prior to 1925).  

If so, it is worth looking at whether I've given a page reference for the Antiphonale Monasticum (or another supplementary book), in order to fill in some of the gaps in your book (the Antiphonale, for example, can be downloaded from CC Watershed, and Clear Creek Monastery has published an inexpensive supplement to it, available from Lulu).

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Understanding the calendar for the office Pt 1 - Why are the Saturday Magnificat antiphons in a different place to the Sunday ones?!

Every year around this time the Diurnal (and other Office books) do something that seems quite inconvenient: it places the variable texts for Saturday Vespers (ie I Vespers of Sunday) in different places, so you have to go to one page for the Magnificat antiphon, another for the collect.

So why does it do that?

I thought this might be a good place to both answer that question, and explain more broadly the different cycles of the calendar that determine what is said at each hour and day.

Why do Saturdays and Sundays after Pentecost have different places in the Diurnal?

Going back to Saturday Vespers, for a moment though, the short answer is that from August, the Scriptural cycle for the first Nocturn of Matins, to which the Magnificat antiphon generally refers, shifts from being dependent on the number of Sundays after Pentecost, to dependent on the calendar month.

The collect though, continues to depend on the number of the Sunday after Pentecost.

As the number of Sundays between Easter and the first Sunday of August differs each year, the Saturday Magnificat antiphons and collects do not always line up.

There can never be less than three Sundays after Pentecost and before August though, so although the Diurnal puts the collects in a separate place from the Second Sunday after Pentecost onwards, other Office books, such as the breviary and the Antiphonale Monasticum, make the split at that point.

All too complex?

Let's go back to first principles!

The cycles in the Office

The key to understanding how the Office works is to appreciate that there are essentially six different cycles at work in the Office, consisting of:
  • the hours, each of which have some fixed texts generally said every day at that particular hour;
  • the day of the week, which dictates changes to either the psalms and a few other texts (antiphons, responsories), and in some cases the chants used (for example the hymn tune used for Compline changes on Saturdays and Sundays);
  • the date - feasts which have fixed dates;
  • the month.  There are days and offices that are fixed to particular days of the week in particular calendar months (such as Matins readings for the Office of Our Lady on Saturday, the September Ember Days and Matins reading from August to November); 
  • the week and season of the liturgical year, which mostly depends on the date of Easter each year; and 
  • 'winter' and  'summer', which dictate the number of readings said at Matins on ferial weekdays (three from November to Easter; one the rest of the year), and which hymns are used at Matins and Lauds (and chant tones at Vespers) are used, with the switch occurring in October. 
Each of these cycles can contribute to what is said each day, with a set of rules dictating which ones take precedence.

In the next post in this series I will start looking at how these cycles work and interact.

Friday, June 12, 2009

On Ordos!

I gather there are a few people searching around for an Ordo to use with the Office, and some confusion about which Ordo is what. So I thought I'd just try and summarise the key differences between the various Ordos I know of, or have been told about, as a bit of an aid to those searching.

This is also a chance for those who are using the Ordo I produce each week to let me know what additional details they would like me to include (no guarantees on delivery though!).

What is an Ordo?

An Ordo is essentially a calendar for use in conjunction with the Mass and/or Office that tells you which feasts are celebrated on a particular date so that you can ensure you use the appropriate texts for the day. At a minimum, it simply lists the feast of the day and tells you the level of it (as in the summary in the sidebar to the right on this blog page). But it often provides a few more details of the particulars of the day (see for example the more detailed weekly notes on this site).

An Ordo is pretty essential - some feast days (such as Easter) change their date every year, and everything else flows from that. And there are inevitably clashes between possible feasts on particular dates, so you need to know what the rules determine should be celebrated on a particular date, and an Ordo should do that.

Some Ordos are extremely detailed - but this is the exception not the norm! In general, unless you live in a monastery where someone else is working it all out for you, you will need to become sufficiently familiar with the structure of the Office to be able to work out that if it is a third class feast, the things that change are....

The choices

The most commonly referred to Ordos are as follows:

  • the Novus Ordo calendar used by the Catholic Church post 1970 - you can find a version of it here. This is the calendar most people will see used at Mass, and works well with the Liturgy of the Hours. It talks about feasts being solemnities or memorials. It is pretty hard to use it, however, in conjunction with one of the traditional forms of the Office (see below);
  • the 1962 Roman Calendar, which you can find here, used for the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, and fits easily with the Roman Breviary. It talks about feasts being Class I, II or III, memorials or commemorations;
  • the 1962-3 Benedictine Calendar, which is what I am providing on this site, is very similar to the 1962 Roman Calendar, differing only in terms of a few saints' feasts in the main. It can readily be used (or adapted) by anyone attending the EF mass, and using any of the traditional forms of the Benedictine Office (ie 1962 or earlier);
  • a pre-1962 Benedictine or Roman calendar, used I gather in the Anglican Breviary and older forms of the Breviary - if your calendar talks about 'doubles' or 'duplexes' and such like terms then it is using one of these calendar variants. If your breviary uses this terminology it is actually pretty easy to superimpose the 1962 calendar onto it (it means dropping a few octaves and other changes though);
  • Anglican or Anglican Use Ordos - Anglican Ordos will not include all feasts used in the Catholic Church, and may include some additional saints' feasts. Anglican Use ordos will presumably be something of a hybrid;
  • the Western Rite Orthodox Ordo - uses the Orthodox calendar which dates Easter differently to the Western Church;
  • Ordos for other religious orders such as the Dominicans, Carmelites, etc. These may come in either Novus Ordo, 1962 or pre-1962 forms.

Note also that most individual Benedictine monasteries (such as Le Barroux) produce their own Ordos for internal use, and by their Oblates, which are likely to differ in some respects from the Universal calendar.

Choosing and Ordo to use

Most people will instinctively want to use the Ordo that goes with whichever form of the Office they have purchased in the interests of simplicity. Fair enough, especially when you are just starting off and struggling to learn the Office.

My own view though is that as far as possible you should work up to using the calendar that aligns most closely with the Mass you attend (particularly if you are a daily mass goer), but admitting of variants to reflect a particular spirituality, such as Benedictine or Dominican, to which you may be attached. So if you attend an EF Mass, by all means use the variants provided by the Benedictine Ordo, it will fit well enough.

The reason is simple: the Office takes the Mass as its starting point, and expands out from it. So on a Sunday, for example, the Gospel at Mass will often provide the antiphon for the Benedictus and Magnificat. At Matins, the Patristic readings will relate to that Gospel. And so forth.

Using the Mass as your starting point of course is harder than it sounds if you want to use one of the traditional forms of the Office, whether Roman, Monastic or some other in conjunction with the OF Mass. Essentially, if you attend a Novus Ordo Mass, you might be able to line up saints' feast days, but the normal passage of liturgical seasons is harder to make work (though technically possible if your Latin is good enough, at least in relation to the Benedictine Office - you need to purchase the new Antiphonale Monasticum from the Monastery of Solesmes).

You should also be aware that whatever Ordo you use, there are local feasts that you will need to add to it - feasts particular to your country, diocese and parish.

My Ordo notes

This site is primarily dedicated to the Benedictine Use. If you are using any of the breviaries or diurnals that are based around the monastic form of the Office (modelled on the provisions set out in the Rule of St Benedict), you should be able to use the Ordo and notes I provide here.

I normally provide page references to the Farnborough edition of the Monastic Diurnal, but if there is sufficient demand, I would be happy to either provide references to the 1962 Monastic Breviary as well. From some of the queries I'm receiving, I think I perhaps need to provide a few more details of the texts to be used in any case, and it may be that this would assist those using other editions of the Diurnal (such as the Lancelot Andrews Press version). I'd certainly be happy to add in Ordo notes for Matins if that would be of assistance to anyone (presumably references to the English of the Office would be preferred?). So let me know what information would be useful - no guarantees, but I'll see what I can do!

Further reading

To learn a bit more about Ordos and the issues associated with them, take a look at my series on learning the Office in the sidebar - parts II, III and XII are relevant.

Friday, May 22, 2009

The Ordinary of Ascensiontide

Now that the great feast of the Ascension is over, we move into 'Ascensiontide' for the next week and a bit. In the pre-1962 calendar this was an 'octave', and remnants of the octave can be found in the Office as it now stands.

You can find the rubrics for this period on page 383* of the Diurnal, and do make sure you know what changes!

The appropriate texts for the minor hours (except for the collects) are set out in the psalter. For the collects, Lauds and Vespers however, you need to keep your ribbon on the page for the Ordinary of Ascensiontide. The key points to note are set out below.

At Lauds

  • the antiphons are as for Eastertide;
  • the chapter is Conresuscitavit..., MD 384*
  • the short responsory is Ascendit Deus, MD 384*
  • the hymn is Iesu, nostra redemptio, MD 384-5* (written out in the Liber Hymnaius, pp 88-9)
  • versicle Dominus in caelo, MD 385*
  • Benedictus antiphon (note that this is used each day except where displaced by a feast, Sunday etc), Ascendo, MD 386*
  • the collect for Friday is on MD 386, for Saturday is of the Little Office of Our Lady, for Sunday, of the Sunday, MD 391* (except in places where Our Lady Help of Christians or another feast is celebrated), for the week after, MD 386*
At Prime
  • the antiphon is as noted in the psalter, Alleluia
  • versicle has alleluia added to it (as for TP)
At Terce, Sext and None
  • the antiphon is alleluia, as noted in the psalter
  • note that the chapters and versicles are in the psalter for Ascensiontide (Tempore Ascensionis).
At Vespers
  • the (single) antiphon is alleluia, as for Eastertide;
  • the chapter is Conrescuscitavit, as for Lauds, MD 384*
  • the responsory is Ascendens, MD 388*
  • the hymn is Iesu, as for Lauds, 384-5*
  • the versicle is Ascendit, MD 388*
  • the antiphon for the Magnificat each day (unless displaced) is O Rex, MD 388*
  • the collects are as for Lauds.