Many thanks, and God +Bless during this penitential season,

Father Charlesworth

You are welcome to join us as an individual, or you may be interested to start a sister chapter in your parish. We would need your name, city/state/country, and e-mail address. If you are interested in starting a sister chapter, it would be advisable to have your own website to post updates and such, and we would gladly link your site to ours here. As a sister chapter, you are free to adopt whichever version of the Divine Office is suitable for your group.

To date, we still only have one chapter which is based at Mater Ecclesiae Mission in Berlin, NJ, so all announcements here pertain to the services offered at Mater Ecclesiae. At Mater Ecclesiae, our chapter follows the 1962 Breviarium Romanum for public use while the individual members may recite other versions of the Office privately.

God bless you and a holy Advent season,

John Rotondi, CSB Facilitator

I have been following the Confraternity of St. Benedict blog for some time and am curious whether I can join this Private Association of Catholic Faithful as a “distance member”. I have been praying the Office in some form since 1995 when I became a Benedictine Ob late (I’m no longer an Oblate because of “Trad issues” – It’s a long story). Please send me an email to the address I provided above if this is a possibility. Thanks! Matt C.

If you check the home page of the Confraternity, under resources you should see a PDF of the Vesperale Romanum. That should have all the texts you need.

Please do let us know if you have any issues and we’ll do what we can to help you.

Thanks so much.

God bless you all.

Br. Igmar Lürssen.

Thank you for your compliment about the Sunday Vesperal; it was a three year long labor of love to put that together from scratch rather than cutting and pasting from the Liber. To date, many minor typos remain which await a good proofreader.

As to your question, when Novum Rubricarum of Bl. Pope John XXIII went into effect on January 1, 1961 many rubrics contained in the Liber up to that point were never corrected or changed to agree with his changes. Even the 1962 edition of the Liber was never given a thorough revision save for a few pages in the Introduction to explain the changes, but hardly any rubrical notes were changed in the corpus of the Liber causing quite a bit of confusion. Who takes the time to read the fine print in the Introduction amidst chanting Vespers on the spot?

Anyway, among these are the rubrics concerning the Office of the Sunday after the Ascension. As of 1961, the Lauds and Vespers of that Sunday take the same triple Alleluia antiphon from the five previous Sundays after Easter rather than the proper antiphons of the feast itself. Everything else from the Chapter onward is the same as under the previous rubric except that there is no Commemoration of the Octave since said Octave was suppressed in 1955.

You are very welcome. Glad to hear you could come out for Tenebrae!