Also I never understood the suppression of Prime.
If you look at a typical monastic schedule it becomes obvious why: mornings were very busy, and as the rest of the day was spent making the monastery function, it left little time for the “contemplation” necessary to be a contemplative order. Vigils, would typically be at 4 or 5 am and lasts an hour or more, up to two hours on feasts and solemnities; followed by Lauds, 45 minutes, and then Prime. All in rapid succession. At my abbey without Prime, Vigils is at 5 am, then Lauds at 7:30 am. The time in between, roughly from 6 to 7:30, is reserved for Lectio Divina, which IMHO works best early in the morning.
The beautiful thing about the Church giving us which liturgy to use is that it severely limits our options. Takes a lot of stress off of us.
Really, for the average layman, you have two versions: the LOTH and the 1961 Office (well, which may or may not be liturgy for laymen, which is the whole point of this thread/my dubia).
Actually, even with the LOTH, we have a bewildering array of choices. When to say the Office of Readings; whether to use the 1-year or 2-year lectionary for the OOR; whether to concatenate the OOR with another hour (I often attach it to Lauds); whether to repeat psalms 4, 90 and 133 for Compline every night; whether to have the OOR as Vigils with two nocturnes on a two-week cycle, with psalmody between the two readings (it’s not in the Rubrics but in Notitiae, the periodical of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments); whether to say all three minor hours or just mid-day prayer; which invitatory to use (hint: if you say the invitatory before Lauds, use psalm 66 on Fridays); whether or not to use the Vigils OT canticles and gospel readings on Sundays, feasts and solemnities; whether or not to use the simpler preces for Vespers. And of course how to organize your prayer schedule while respecting the verity of the hours. In fact the LOTH has
way more options than the 1961 breviary.
Other technically valid Offices could be the various monastic uses; I’d say that’s a big area for laymen unless you’re somehow associated with the particular order.
Our oblate constitution requires that we pray at least part of the LOTH and specifies we may use the Roman Office, the schema of our abbey, other monastic schemas, a Little Office, or even an abridged office. We do as our condition in life allows. I vacillate between our monastic schema and the LOTH. I often pray the monastic in week III of the cycle, because I hate that week in the LOTH; Vespers is way too short, they got it wrong, they put the long psalms at mid-day, and the short Gradual psalms at Vespers. I don’t miss any psalms doing that as the monastic is a 1-week cycle. It also makes up for the fact that on a week like this, with three feasts, there are a number of psalms that I wouldn’t otherwise see for 8 weeks.
