IN PRAISE OF THE NEW OFFICE
by Terrence Kardong, O.S.B.
First, a word of clarification. The “new Office” referred to here is actually about forty years old. In the early 1970s the Benedictine monasteries of the world were allowed to revise the traditional form of the Divine Office by way of experimentation. The result of this process is the choir prayer as it is now practiced in our monasteries. Of course, in comparison to the traditional Office, which was essentially the one prescribed in detail by St. Benedict in his Rule, the new Office is still in its infancy. After all, forty years is but the blink of an eye compared with fourteen hundred.
Yet even if forty years is not such a long time, it is certainly long enough to qualify as a significant unit of time that can be evaluated. To put it another way, we have now had enough time to know quite well how the new Office “feels.” In my opinion, it feels good, so good that I want to elaborate a bit on my experience with it. I feel a particular urge to do so since we have lately been hearing some criticism of the “new liturgy” of Vatican II. This last refers to the Mass of Paul VI that has been in place since 1970. Apparently this “new Mass” is about to be slightly revised. But my main purpose here is to come down on the side of those who are very happy with the “new liturgy.”
In order to lay out my case, I will proceed in three steps. First, I will describe
the “old Office,” namely, the one that all Benedictine monks prayed before c. 1970.
Then I will furnish some notes on the actual historical process whereby the monks
were permitted to set aside this “old Office,” if they chose to do so, to experiment
with new forms of their own devising. Finally, I will describe the “new Office” as
it is practiced by most of the monasteries in the English-
THE OLD OFFICE
As I said, the old Office was the one set out in detail in the Rule of Benedict,
Chapters 8-
In theory, these eight choir hours were performed at certain set hours: Vigils at night; Lauds at daybreak, Prime at six a.m., Terce at nine a.m. and so forth. But in fact, most communities found it inconvenient or even impossible to maintain that kind of schedule. So it was typical to find Vigils in the evening, Lauds early in the morning, with Prime and Terce following right after. Most communities grouped the Day Hours in such a way that they were prayed “back to back.” Sometimes it was found necessary to “anticipate” the hours so that we found ourselves reciting Vespers just after lunch! These accommodations were necessary to enable us to accomplish the whole Office in addition to our work, which was usually in schools.
One of the characteristics of the “old Office” that almost every novice quickly ran into was its complexity. Although it normally involved using only one book, there was always lots of paging around to follow the various parts of the ceremony. There were many ribbons in those old breviaries and they were there for a reason. The Divine Office was so intricate that beginning novices had to prepare themselves beforehand outside of choir; otherwise they would be hopelessly lost. Indeed, one novice I knew regularly put his breviary aside and simply prayed his rosary!
That was a temptation that most novices could not afford to indulge, because they were required to function as prayer leaders, called “acolytes.” Imagine the tension, even terror, that the new novice brought to the Divine Office when he was expected to lead it, even though he could barely comprehend its structure. To make matters worse, we had a system of corrections in which the monk who made an error that disrupted the Divine Office was required to “kneel out” at the end of the Office. While the president of the Office was chanting the closing prayer, the offending acolyte had to kneel in the middle of the sanctuary in ritual reparation. This was a form of “shaming” that only worked until you became hardened.
Even this was not enough. When the acolyte hesitated with his part, another monk would jump in with the correct intonation. Of course, this was meant to keep the Office moving right along, but it also offered an ideal opening for a certain type of busybody who delighted in showing up other people. Granted, it tended to keep people on their toes, but in retrospect it seems to lack a bit of Christian charity. Why couldn’t someone have merely showed the acolyte the needed text instead of embarrassing him? I suspect that those kinds of “gotcha” games did not increase the average monk’s love for the “old Office.”
Perhaps a more fundamental question might be why there was such an emphasis on speed in the old Office? Perhaps there was a general feeling that we needed to move right along to get through the whole thing? Whatever the case, everything was done at high speed, with rapid Latin recitation and almost no pausing at all. Just how fast it moved was brought home to me when I was a student in Italy in 1977. At that time I had the chance to spend a week at Monte Cassino, the motherhouse of all Benedictines. By 1977 I was used to the new Office in America, but at Monte Cassino nothing had changed. It was quite a shock returning to the old Office, with its machine gun recitation, frantic paging around and breathless, headlong rush to the end. It was like stepping into a time warp and I thanked God Almighty I could escape after a few days.
Another Italian experience was even worse. When two of us Americans lived with the
monks in Florence in 1975, we naively assumed that the Divine Office would be the
simplified new Office we already knew at home. Surprise, surprise! When we showed
up at the night Office, there was only one other old monk in attendance. He looked
at me and said: “You are acolyte.” He told the old American monk, “You are the hebdomadarian,”
that is, leader. It was a nightmare! It was the first week of the novitiate all over
again. Basically, we were back in the old mumbo-
Of course, the Latin did not make things any easier. In itself, Latin is not a difficult language to pronounce. Anybody who has taken a few years of the language, and that included virtually all monks in the clerical track, can recite it together with other people. Certainly, you do not need to know what it means! By and large, we recited it and chanted it without knowing what it meant. But things got more complicated when we had to read the lessons. In that case, you were up there reading alone and the chances for mistakes were multiple. Typically, the readings were harder Latin than the psalms, so it was harder to negotiate them. And for some monks, the whole business of reading Latin publicly and alone was excruciating. Sometimes the whole thing risked a psychic meltdown.
Sometimes the experience of the old Office was simply fatigue. At times, the night Office, that is, Matins and Compline, became very long. Ordinarily, this Office lasted about 45 minutes, but on major feasts it could go on for up to 75 minutes. This was especially the case in June, when there was a string of solemnities that had long Offices: Trinity, Corpus Christi, Sacred Heart, Peter and Paul, Precious Blood. Now, we also wore our festal cucullas for these Offices, so they could be quite uncomfortable. This kind of experience led some monks to dub the Divine Office onus Dei (labor of God) instead of opus Dei (work of God). Of course, none of this came anywhere near the enormous Offices of the Eastern Church, but it could seem pretty burdensome.
Perhaps by this time, a few readers are shaking their heads. Certainly, some monks did not find the old Office burdensome at all. They loved the Latin and they loved the Gregorian Chant. They probably also loved the intricacy of the rubrics, the highspeed recitation and what not. I don’t remember hearing too much complaining about the Office before 1970. And it should be noted that some of the world’s monasteries, notably the Solesmes (French) Congregation, have opted to stay with the traditional Office. No doubt they find it a very good prayer experience. I once compared notes with a French monk. I told him we now spend about two hours in church. He said that they usually spend about three hours a day in church, but on feasts it could reach four. When I blurted out “Isn’t that a lot?” he shot back “Not if you love the liturgy!” So there.
Obviously, it all depends on your sensibility. If you find long ceremonies a source
of spiritual refreshment, then you will not find long Offices burdensome. Nonetheless,
since the earliest monastic times there has been a sense that even liturgy could
get out of hand. In the Life of Pachomius, he is visited in a dream by an angel who
tells him that his monks are not to sing more than twelve psalms at the Divine Office.
Apparently there was a temptation to sing more, and indeed some of the early Rules
have up to twenty-
In case anyone has concluded by this point that my basic problem with the old Office
was simply that I do not know enough Latin, I should probably clarify that point.
I would agree that in the days when I was a young monk singing the Latin Office,
my knowledge of Latin was quite deficient. But I can also report that it has improved
considerably since that time. That may sound odd, since the Church has largely dropped
Latin in the post-
To be more specific, I was sent away to get an M.A. in Latin in the 1960s. This may have been the abbot’s perverse sense of humor, since I had never been much good at this subject in school. But when I got to graduate school, I was faced with the necessity of either learning the language thoroughly or flunking out. Fortunately, I had a couple of really competent teachers who finally got through to me some fairly difficult concepts as the sequence of tenses and so forth. Back home, I spent some years at the dreary task of teaching young boys Latin. The end result was that I actually learned to read the stuff.
When the Church then dropped the Latin liturgy, I felt mildly betrayed because I thought I had wasted my best years learning an obsolete subject. Little did I foresee that I would soon enough be using Latin almost every day as a scholar of ancient monastic texts. By now I actually find some pleasure in this language, but it is still not easy for me to read it with any fluency. I am pretty sure I could now get more out of the Latin psalms, but I doubt very much that I could comprehend the Latin readings without the text in front of me. Anyway, I certainly do not hate Latin!
THE REVOLUTION
After the Vatican Council in the 1960s, the time seemed ripe for change. When the
abbots of the world descended on Rome for their periodical congresso in 1966, they
all found a note on their desks from Pope Paul VI. The Holy Father told the abbots
that he had heard that they planned to discuss the possible revision of the Divine
Office in their meeting. Paul VI admonished the abbots not to do that. He said he
had decided that the Benedictines must maintain the traditional Latin Office in all
its splendor. If they did not do so, who would? Now, it was well-
But there were other abbots who felt that they could not accommodate the Pope on this point. Some of them emphasized that their monks keenly felt the need for a revision of the Office, so they could not table the question. One abbot said, to great effect, that the abbots are not children who are better seen than heard. No, they are the adult sons of the Holy Father, and as such they have to tell him what they really think. What they really thought was that it was absolutely necessary for the monks to rework their daily prayer in the way they found best suited their situation. The ancient Office no longer met their needs and so it must be set aside. They did not petition the Holy See as a body to this effect, but neither did they hide their strong desire for change in this matter.
Almost immediately after this strange episode in church history, the Holy See tacitly changed its mind. The word came down to the relevant department in the Vatican that any monastery that asked for permission to experiment with the Office should be allowed to do so. Perhaps this could be cited as an example of the Vatican’s method of operation: first they say no, then they say NO, and finally they say yes.
But we now know that the matter was trickier than that. Not too long after the Congress
of Abbots, the new Abbot Primate went to see the Pope. Abbot Rembert Weakland was
a young American who had previously known Paul VI (Giovanni Montini) when he was
Archbishop of Milan. So he felt confident enough to ask the Pope why he had told
the abbots to keep to the traditional Office. Weakland told Paul VI that most of
the monks wanted the vernacular, not Latin, and they also wanted to try new forms
of the Divine Office. At that point, Paul VI expressed considerable frustration,
even exclaiming “I have been given misleading information! I have no intention of
forcing the monks to pray differently than what they want!” And he added rather bitterly
that three high-
In my opinion this is a highly instructive episode in the history of church authority and even in the nature of the church. The fact that the Pope himself did not feel he should make the monks pray in ways that contradict their own experience says a lot about Paul VI. But it also says a lot about the very nature of the Divine Office. It is first of all prayer, and if it ceases to work well as prayer, then it can and should be modified. One is reminded of the old adage of the English Abbot John Chapman who said: “Pray as you can, not as you can’t.” That was what the abbots were telling the Pope: we can’t pray like this any more.
They knew that this information would make the Pope sad, since he loved the Latin Office. But fine as it is, the Latin Office is not something that fell down from heaven as Divine revelation. Certainly it has proven fruitful and satisfying for thousands and thousands of monks down through the centuries. The problem is that it no longer does so for most of us. Furthermore, we monks fear being made into a sort of living tableau in a museum. The monastery is not a theme park where you can go to see how people lived and prayed in the Middle Ages. It is a living organism with its own life. Our time is now, and so we refuse to function as a relic of past ages.
THE NEW OFFICE
So then we were finally allowed to re-
At first, there was a kind of chaotic atmosphere. When you came to the Divine Office you never quite knew what you might find. Sometimes one got the impression that somebody had just cooked up something, and that that someone was not necessarily a very good cook. In one monastery where I was giving a retreat, the Offices had become so short that one did not dare come a few minutes late because the Sisters would be heading out the door. In other communities, you might hear a reading from some Hindu followed by prayers by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Jesus Christ did not always make it into the program. In short, some silly things could happen in the new Office, but that is the nature of experimentation: it sometimes fails.
At times, one got the impression that the whole process was becoming a bit much. Anybody who had the job of designing new liturgies for the Divine Office faced the ongoing task of creating things from scratch. I myself worked up special Vespers services for Saturday evenings in which I tried to configure the whole liturgy around the second reading for the following Sunday. That meant studying the reading (usually from Paul) and then finding material to go with it. I usually wrote a short commentary on the reading, which took plenty of time. But then I also had to find psalms and hymns and other prayers to compliment the second reading. Some weeks, I was tempted to simply fall back on the old breviary and let it go at that.
Actually, the ancient monks had apparently run into the same problem in their time. The Great Church (parishes) had always used special psalms for morning and evening prayer. But there are only so many psalms that refer to the time of day, so the monks eventually settled on a running cursus for the rest of the Offices. That is, they recited or sang the psalms in order without any particular reference to the time of day or the feast. When you want to pray publicly every day and even several times a day, you really cannot get too fancy or you end up doing nothing at all. Creativity has its limits.
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Volume 37, Number 2 |
Richardton, ND 58652 |
April 2009 |
