Liturgy of the Hours for Laymen Before Vatican 2?

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Nobody here is shaming people for not praying the LOTH. Nobody here is stating lay Catholics have an obligation to pray, or are being pressured to pray, the LOTH.

Might I respectfully suggest that your own internal agitation (for whatever reason or reasons) and your own subconscious feelings of this particular prayer as being ‘reserved to the clergy/religious alone’) are making you attribute the motives and ‘pressure’ and ‘shaming’ you state others do, wrongly?

For you are the one who is attempting to ‘shame’ others by stating they ‘put pressure’ or ‘shame’ other Catholics simply by stating that the prayer is a good one for Catholics to pray, if they feel called to do so. It is you who states that lay Catholics praying the Hours are attempting to ‘clericalize’ themselves, and thus are pressuring for people not to pray the Hours lest they appear to you to be ‘playing priests’. It is you who should be ashamed of your intransigence and your disrespectful of fellow Catholics, sir.
 
I second those notions @stpurl

Edward, you really should just drop this and conform yourself to the mind of the Church.

Any other response would be less than Catholic, at this point.
 
No mischaracterization or shaming here or anywhere else. And even in this late post you STILL hold on this notion of the LOTH as modeling priests despite having been corrected again and again.

Emphasizing the excellence of the Divine Office is hardly shaming anyone who is not bound. You have merely drawn multiple non sequiturs from it. Specifically, that the LOTH is imitating priests and that those not bound who don’t pray it are somehow shamed.

In fact it can be said that the only one shaming here is you. That somehow the laypeople who have embraced and accepted the Church’s exhortation have somehow not figured out their prayer life or what to do and so imitate priests when it is in fact the reverse that is true. We pray the Office because we have figured it out. It is a treasure still so unknown but so excellent from which we have benefitted so much we tell the story. And that is what for some bizarre reason you object to under the guise of clericalization or praying priests.

The Church opposes your false view in a few words in Sacrosanctum concilium 100. The Church encourages what you so unreasonably discourage.
 
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Edward_H said:
Lay Catholics are under no obligation - and should be put under no pressure - to pray the LOTH.
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Wrong again. Some lay Catholics do have an obligation to it. Oblates such as myself, third order members, for instance. Nor, as I’ve already mentioned, is the LOTH mimicking priests. Women’s orders and congregations have been praying the Divine Office for, literally, thousands of years. Last time I checked, women cannot be priests

The same goes for non-ordained religious men. They would all laugh at your characterization of their obligation as “imitating priests”.
 
Seconding something doesn’t mean it’s true.

I’m tired of the over-devout shaming other Catholics with their LOTH habits.
 
The over-devout scare new Catholics away with their heavy burdens.

It’s fine for those that want to…but the over-devout should temper their own enthusiasms.
 
What ‘over-devout’ would that be, and give examples, please. Name names.

What gives you the right to determine somebody else is ‘over’ (or ‘under’) devout, friend?

What does the Church say about this?

You personally may have suffered what you felt was a shaming, but does that mean it actually occurred, or is occurring to others?

Is it not possible, I ask again, that your own personal feelings are coloring your judgment and making you feel that actions are occurring which are not, in actual fact, occurring?

Is it not possible that your personal opinion about some unnamed person or persons in some unnamed place at some unnamed time is in fact erroneous?

That your tender concern for the feelings of others is, in **fact,**concern for your own feelings and no one else’s, and your desire to assuage your own feelings of shame which may not even have been intended by those you felt 'shamed you, by attempting to redirect that shame onto others?
 
I have every right to draw from my many years as a Catholic making conclusions as I see fit.

I taught RCIA for years. I give parish and diocesan formation to children, teens, and adults.

I’ve heard (face to face, not in this silly and irksome forum) too many soon to be Catholics and new Catholics describe some of the over-the-top, ill-considered advice they get from the over-devout (you need to say the rosary daily, you need to get the LOTH and pray it…etc.).

No…be reasonable…befriend these people…take them out for a burger and beer…listen to them,…gauge their level of maturity and readiness…be ready for “little” ideas, reassure them of their freedom, remind them of the 6 ACTUAL precepts of the Catholic Church, don’t overwhelm them…or make them feel they have to do all this other stuff…as good as it might be.

You don’t have a right to prevent my observations or to contort them into some sort of Freudian soup.
 
the whole “third order” business was precisely a response and tendency toward clericalism. And a way to raise money for those orders.
 
Edward_H said:
the whole “third order” business was precisely a response and tendency toward clericalism. And a way to raise money for those orders.
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Now you’ve gone from disdain for prayer to disdain for religious orders. AND outright falsehood.

You need some serious reflection time, Edward. Your attitude toward the Church is seriously skewed.
 
Please stop with the exaggeration and distortion of my point.

My point is entirely true. 3rd orders…are entirely derivative and spawned from what? An order of religious or clerics!

By nature…it’s tied to and derivative of this or that order.

There can be no dispute of this. Their very name points to and connects to an order of clerics or religious.

And it’s well known that lay 3rd orders DO PROVIDE a source of funding for their orders. That’s often part of the “3rd order” commitments.

There can be no argument.

Now…these things are fine for some.

But there’s an entirely other way to pursue one’s lay vocation…totally unaffiliated with “orderings”.

Vatican II highlighted this “universal call to holiness” for the lay.

Again…they may be good for some…they may not be good for some.

But to sort of push these on new Catholics is ill-advised.

Way too much focus on “being members within a member”.
 
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You are in fact apparently ignorant of the history of third orders as well, apparently, of the Church’s teaching on the Liturgy of the Hours.

And yes, out of your own mouth you have testified (though without names) that it is purely from your own fallible, limited, and ‘perceptual’ so-called experience that you have deigned to decide what is ‘over devout’ and that apparently according to you perhaps tens of Catholics at your parish over tens of years have fallen short of what you deem ‘acceptable’. . .and you have conflated that into an indictment of some nebulous and apparently large enough to be concerning worldwide group of the overdevout who are making life ‘unhappy’ for tens of prospective Catholics, according to your perception.

Again, your concern for ‘others’ is a concern for you and your need for a validation for your feelings and ‘your’ point of view which you desperately need to be correct.

Listen, none of us is perfect, and all of us, I venture to say, have had concepts dear to our heart which we feel are being distorted or ‘hurt’ by tens of others (whom we conflate to large groups) based on how ‘we’ feel about said concepts. I’ll be the first to admit that I can go off the deep end when I ‘feel’ that some are making unfair judgments about people who like traditional things and practices, and yes, there will be comments made which will seem to justify my perception. . .but on sober thought and prayer, I will see that a lot of the ‘unfairness’ is directed not at me personally or even at an individual person, but on what the ‘unfair person’ has himself or herself experienced.

That’s why I believe that you yourself, Edward, were ‘shamed’ (in your thoughts) at some point, and that from then on, every ‘code word’ or talk of the LOTH has eaten into you so that even hearing a person say, “After Vatican 2 the LOTH prayers are being said by more people” (compare, if you will, to “After Vatican 2 the use of free form prayer as opposed to ‘rote’ litanies is used by more people”) has become for you a revisiting of the same feelings of ‘shame’ which you wish not only to be not ‘felt’ by others, but which you wish to make not felt by YOU. . .and in the way of ‘shaming’ the ‘over-devout’ instead.

But 99% of the time there is no ‘over-devout’ and 99% of the time there is no ‘anti-traditionalist’, and the feelings we have come not from what is ‘said’ but from what is perceived or felt.

People who speak of the LOTH as being a good prayer for those called to it as opposed to those ‘obligated’ to it are not trying to shame you or anyone else, Edward. And they are not trying to ‘play priest’ either, or trying to 'put heavy burdens on others.

And the sooner you can ‘let it go’, accept this, and move on and let other people alone to have their own prayer life and not be soothing your ego instead, the better.
 
stpurl said:
And the sooner you can ‘let it go’, accept this, and move on and let other people alone to have their own prayer life and not be soothing your ego instead,
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I’ve got a sneaking suspicion Edward won’t be ceasing the pursuit of having his ego stroked anytime soon. Who knows, maybe he’ll have a sudden burst of humility and conform himself to the Church, instead of trying to bend the Church to his will.
 
I don’t see why you need to make this topic personal. You called me ignorant.

I haven’t in any of my posts accused any person by name of anything, nor have I ascribed to them in particular anything that I have said about this topic.

But all I get are personal assaults from you.
 
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Cut it out.

I haven’t made a personal swipe at any particular person here. I am trying to talk about the idea of these things…but you turn it personal.

Why?
 
Except the article you are using to stand by your erroneous assertions clearly refutes them:

“The old monastic orders had attached to their abbeys confraternities of lay men and women, going back in some cases to the 8th century.”

“The general idea of lay people affiliated to religious orders, such as the Benedictine Oblates or confraters developed as founders and benefactors of monasteries were received into spiritual fellowship, and later clothed in death in some religious habit. So too the Templars had a whole system whereby layfolk could partake in some sort in their privileges and in the material administration of their affairs. But the essential nature of the tertiary is really an innovation of the thirteenth century.”

Next time maybe you should actually read the reference you use to back up your ludacris assertions, Edward.
 
from the article "In relation to religious orders, a third order is an association of persons who live according to the ideals and spirit of a Catholic, Anglican, or Lutheran religious order, but do not belong to its “first order” (generally, in the Catholic Church, the male religious: for example Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelite and Augustinian friars), or its “second order” (contemplative female religious associated with the “first order”). "

Down the food chain from clerics and religious.

My point stands taller.
 
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Cut it out with that victim card nonsense.

Can’t handle the heat, get outta the kitchen.
 
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