The Priestly Ministry
The Breviary
First Meditation - An Obligation and a Treasure
I. As a mental focusing before the recitation of the daily Office, and now as a preamble to this meditation, let us heed the majestic voice of the Church echoing the rallying call of the royal Prophet:
Venite, exultemus Domino, jubilemus Deo, Salutari nostro!Throughout her whole history the Church has enjoined upon her priests. the canonical Hours, composed chiefly of the psalms. Vestiges of this ruling are to be found in the Apostolic Constitutions of Pope St. Clement, in Tertullian, and even in Philo Judaeus' book on the Therapeutae.
"Come, friends, rejoice in the Lord's honour; cry we out merrily to God, our strength and deliverer!" (Ps. xciv,1)
The precept of the Lateran Council should be familiar to all priests: "Districte praecipientes, in virtute sanctae obedientiae, ut Divinum Officium nocturnum, pariter atque diurnum, studiose celebrent atque devote." A strict command, in virtue of holy obedience, that all priests perform the Divine Office, the night Office and the day Office, both diligently and devoutly.
Canon 135 of the new Code runs as follows:
"Clerics in Major Orders are under obligation to recite daily all the canonical hours according to their proper and approved liturgical books." (Trans. Woywood)It is therefore a grave, inescapable duty which I freely took upon myself at ordination. Have I, in actual practice, always considereo it as such? Haven't I often claimed, under futile pretexts, to be released from this obligation?
II. We should not undermine the force of this obligation imagining it to be merely ecclesiastical, something human. Even if it were, it would none the less be seriously binding in conscience. The Church, as the perfeet Society that She is, has received from her Divine Founder the power to legislate, the power most essential to any self-contained human society properly constituted.
In reality, however, it is something more. The Divine Office is radically and substantially of Divine Law; it is of the pith and marrow of our priesthood, of priesthood in general; for, as the Epistle to the Hebrews expresses it:
"The purpose for which any high priest is chosen from among his fellowmen, and made a representative of men in their dealings with God, is to offer gifts and sacrifices in expiation of their sins." (Heb. v, 1)Hence the Apostles thought themselves bound primarily to prayer, in preference to corporal works of mercy: It is not reason that we should leave the word of God and serve tables. . . we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word. (Acts vi, 2 and 4)
We are the lawful representatives before God, appointed by the Church; Her ambassadors at the Divine Court; and the ambassadorial petitions we are asked to present before God are not left to our private initiative, they are given us and even formulated for us word for word: the prayers of the breviary and other liturgical books. Mother Church knows only too well for She understands her children as only a mother can - that left to our own devices we should make a hash of this petitioning, if we did it at all.
The Office, therefore, is of Divine Law as regards its essence, and of Ecclesiastical Law in the concrete form of its expression. Thus the priest who is physically debarred from reciting the breviary is dispensed by the Church, but not entirely; it is commuted to him for other prayers.
O God, I believe that it is Thou personally who hast aid upon me a strict obligation to pray more frequently than any other soul. I realise that at ordination I assumed the most honourable task of representing the great Kingdom of Thy Church before Thy lofty Throne.
I am the mouthpiece of hundreds of millions of Catholics, of countless sincere non-Catholics, and even of all mankind, of the entire creation: I speak for them before the Throne of the Most High.
What a sublime function! Who am I to deserve it?
III. Justice - commutative justice very often, and always equity - bids me say my Office. If the Church imposes on me the obligation of prayer and sacrifice, it is quite right that I should find attached thereto the means of a livelihood; and vice-versa, if I accept the livelihood I also incur the corresponding obligations. This is the idea, implicit at least, in the minds of the faithful who have bequeathed their possessions to the clergy, demanding of them in return the divine praises. In the old foundations this was often laid down explicitly.
If the faithful provide me with a livelihood, if I am kept in food and clothes, and even live in the lap of luxury, at the expense of the faithful, so that I may fulfil my priestly obligations, what if I neglect my duty? Do I not hold myself up to scorn? I could well appropriate to myself the caustic comment which the humble, hard-working St. Vincent de Paul used to think applied to him: "Wretch! you're not even earning your daily bread!"
IV. Apart from the foregoing motives and that of the common good, what spiritual treasures would be mine if I said the Divine Office properly! Treasures of the mind, treasures of the heart, imperishable treasures of the soul.
I should be making the holiest use of part of my day by the fulfilment of Christ's great precept: "To pray continually, and never be discouraged"; a precept reaffirmed afterwards by St. Paul: "Never cease praying." (Luke xviii, 1) I Thess. v, 17)
I should be steeping my spirit in the ever-fresh aroma of those old prayers of the Church, the only prayers worthy of God; of those psalms wherein the Divine Spirit pleads with unutterable groans and longings through the voice of all creatures visible and invisible, a pleading that runs through the whole scale of human love, feeling, and mysterious yearning.
And perhaps I shall also begin to be curious and delve into the hidden treasures amassed in the liturgical books, in the Missal, Ritual, Breviary, etc.; books where one can learn the language that is pleasing to God, books abounding in sovereign beauty, enough to enrich many a literature; books that in sheer grace of style, depth of feeling, boldness and sublimity of thought, surpass the greatest literatures, either popular or classical.
Let us hang our heads in shame. To our confusion, it has taken strangers, lay-people, sometimes even atheists and enemies of Christ's Church, to penetrate our cathedrals and churches and bring to light their innumerable artistic treasures. We were like a stupid child who needed the assistance of a neighbour to point out to him the value of the furniture and jewels bequeathed him by his father. Learned men, even men with no religion, had to come from outside and explain to us the power and grandeur radiating from those liturgical prayers and canticles which we maul and mumble so listlessly day after day.
Resolutions
1. I shall never forget the practical issue: that the obligation to say the Office is sub gravi, and that therefore I commit a mortal sin the day I omit it entirely, or a notable part of it equivalent to one of the small Hours, unless I am excused for some good and solid reason of charity or justice or I am handicapped by some physical or moral impossibility; and if I hold a benefice, in the strict sense of the word, any unwarranted omission of the Office obliges me to make restitution.
2. In my spare moments - and who hasn't them? - I propose to study the breviary: the psalter and the prayers added by the Church. Could I honestly say that I ever spent so much as half an hour in such profitable study? Am I quite sure I don't consider the breviary something unrelated to practical life, futile, scarcely mtelligible; in fine, something to be read just because it has to, because it's the law, and that's that? To persuade myself of the shallowness of this judgement, this
very day I'm going to study slowly all the prayers of Prime and Compline in order to grasp their meaning thoroughly.
Jesus, grant me the grace to end my life with the recitation of Compline; I would take it as a sign of my predestination.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.
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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!
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