THE OFFICIAL PRAYER OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

You know that there is an official energy bar for the Olympics and that your favorite sports team has an official airline, and there is also an official prayer of the Catholic Church. I love this prayer though I will admit I did not always. It was a drudgery for a long time but now it is as important to me as sitting down to eat (and sitting down to eat I take very, very seriously.)

It is called the Liturgy of the Hours. Clergy and religious are required to pray it daily and it is highly recommended that ALL Catholics pray it. It consists of five parts and is prayed throughout the day, sanctifying the day and keeping us united in mind of God. There is of course Morning Prayer (Lauds) and Evening Prayer (Vespers), which are the most important of the lot. They are the hinges upon which all the other prayers turn. They consist of psalms and canticles, readings, responsorials, petitions, and the Our Father. Midday Prayer is much shorter but similar. Night Prayer (Compline), which is my favorite, leads us off to sleep and ends with placing ourselves in the care of the Blessed Virgin. There is also the Office of Readings, which can float around and be said at any time including the night before.

You might not think so but this can be difficult to work into your schedule. That is why they give us such a long time in the seminary to get used to it before we take a vow to pray it daily.

Sometimes there is a great temptation to skip it. We used to study for tests late into the night (well, morning actually) and someone would say, “Why don’t we skip Night Prayer tonight?We’ve got to get this done.” But experience taught us to do otherwise. We found that if we stopped for prayer work went more smoothly and more quickly. If we did not stop the work would drudge on more painfully and longer.

It is also a tricky thing to catch on as to the “how” of it. My suggestion is to ask your parish priest if you could pray part of it with him one day to get the hang of it. (Ideally it is supposed to be prayed in public anyway.)

To get access to the prayer you could buy the four-volume set but unless you are into it and taking it very seriously I probably would not recommend that to you straight off. (It can be quite an expense.) There are a number of single volume versions the most popular probably being The Shorter Christian Book of Prayer. Then again Rich, who has started praying it with me, says that HERE is a daily post of the prayer and even better, HERE is a daily pod cast where you can pray it along and learn the ins and outs of the Church’s official prayer.

As it is supposed to be the public prayer of the Church you might also consider gather a few people to pray it. Even if you only did Night Prayer once a week in this way, the universal prayer of the Church would at least find some exposure to the very Body of Christ for which it was intended.

That being said, you probably pray a version of the Liturgy of the Hours now though perhaps you do not realize it. The Rosary is called the "Poor Man's Psalter" as the 150 Aves correspond to the number of psalms, the prayers that make up the majority of the prayes of the Liturgy of the Hours. It is said that in early times, the people wanting to pray as the monks did but not having the resources to do so would pray the Rosary, meditating on the Life of Christ, and uniting their prayers with the monks who chanted the Divine Office.