Pre-Vatican II: why did some liturgical revisions seem strange and erratic?

[OraLabora]

I’m afraid I don’t follow your post! Your quote from the Rule shows that St. Benedict believes that the actual Psalter schema isn’t what’s important, so long as all 150 Psalms are prayed in a week. The Pian Breviary disrupted the arrangement in order that all 150 Psalms would be prayed weekly, whereas the LotH not only has suppressed some of the Psalms and some verses, but it’s also arrayed in a four-week schema. So which edition am I to believe is more in line with St. Benedict’s vision?

The psalm schema laid out by St. Benedict calls for 250 psalms a week, not 150. His comment about 150 psalms is practically a footnote, 1 paragraph at the end of 12 chapters describing how to pray the Office. In reading the rule, you can nearly hear his exasperation: “I’ve told you how to do it, but obviously you’re not up to the task of reciting 250 psalms per week, so do as you wish but do at least 150”. If the psalter schema was not important to him, he wouldn’t have spent 12 chapters describing how to pray the Divine Office in a monastery, carefully detailing which psalms to say at which hours, how many lessons to say at Vigils, etc.

How is this a red herring? From the perspective of the layperson, they’re missing out on a lot more Psalms than the curse-themed ones. But if they were to pray the Breviary in its whole, they would go through the entire Psalter. Now with the LotH, nobody, unless putting in the extra effort to know exactly which chapters/verses are missing and praying them supplementally, prays the whole Psalter.

No, not nobody. In the monastic cursus the cursing psalms and verses are still there, ad libitum. They’re in the Monastic breviary (post-Vatican II) that I use, and I pray them. But that said, the laity would have only prayed them rarely in the pre-VII era, perhaps only when on retreat at a monastery because they were at hours rarely, if ever, attended by the laity. The laity simply didn’t pray the breviary in those days except on those days when Vespers and perhaps Lauds, were said in the parish church on Sundays or high feasts. The laity had other devotions, the Rosary, the Angelus, etc.

So in a sense the laity are not being “deprived” of anything that they previously had though you can argue that the secular clergy and some religious are being deprived of those psalms. What’s changed is that the Divine Office has evolved from being a prayer generally, if not officially, attached to the clerical state (see other thread on clericalism) to a prayer available and encouraged for the priesthood of all believers. Is the LOTH perfect? Of course it isn’t. But it’s accessible, it is structurally sound, with no major structural innovations other than the placement of the hymn of Lauds, Vespers and Compline (and again in the monastic breviaries, the previous placement, after the reading and responsory, is permitted ad libitum and is what’s used at our abbey). The structure of psalmody, reading, responsory, gospel canticle, etc. is retained and generally respects ancient tradition. Many traditions have actually been returned to the LOTH that were lost in 1910, as I have pointed out, and for anybody familiar with the traditional monastic Divine Office, it’s fairly easy to see the connection. My argument is that it’s in fact easier than the 1910 (number of psalms excepted), but that’s a matter of opinion. I’m pretty sure though, that the monastic connection is no harder to discern in the 1970 than the 1910. The number of psalms does not alone define the Divine Office, after all the Monastic only has 4 psalms at Vespers whereas the secular office of 1910-1970 has 5.

Might you also address the point about Tenebrae?

I think it has more to do with the 1955 Holy Week changes that no longer allowed anticipation of Lauds, than the 1970 LOTH. It is still done extra-liturgically, in some places. Even with SP that allows use of the 1962 liturgies, it’s not easy to include Tenebrae due to the fact that Lauds cannot be anticipated and the extinguishing of the candles happened and was structured around Matins in Lauds, being anticipated the night before. One other nice thing about the 1970 Office is that it’s no longer acceptable to run all Offices together at once to get them over with, and the verity and character of the hour must be respected (Lauds in the morning, Vespers in the evening, etc.) Only the OOR has been given more flexibility yet it can still be used as Matins/Vigils either the prior evening, in the middle of the night or early in the morning. These are all licit options that still allow the LOTH to find great meaning in community prayer in choir.

The 1970 LOTH, for all its shortcomings (and it has some) is a great gift to the Church as as a whole and in particular has made participation in the universal and public prayer of the Church something that the entire laity, even those with little free time on their hands, can be part of. I can’t imagine father or mother, for example, praying the 250 psalms per week of the monastic Divine Office; even the 1910 would be a handful. For the laity, and the older Offices, it would only be possible to pray part of them for most folks. You don’t only lose the imprecatory psalms, you lose probably more than half of the psalms! At least with the LOTH one can get exposure to all psalms except three, and most verses, over the course of a 4-week cycle. Looking at it realistically then, rather than theoretically, the 1970 LOTH will actually give many laity more of the psalter than they ever could have reasonably had access to using the pre-Vatican II breviaries.