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Catholic. The Mass readings and the Liturgy of the Hours are those of the Catholic Church and their content is the same as in the Latin edition of the Liturgy of the Hours published by the Vatican. The calendar used is the General Calendar, with local calendars included where we have details of them. About Universalis Publishing tells you more about us.
If the calendars don't match, then either you've chosen the wrong calendar for your location, or we've got something wrong. Please let us know if you find any discrepancies: there are bound to be some because this is such a large project.
Similarly, do please let us know if a reading doesn't match what you expect. It could well be that we've mistyped something.
On the other hand it may just be that there is more than one allowable reading for the day in question, or that your book has got things wrong. This blog entry goes into more detail.
Note that our choice of Invitatory Psalm means that Psalm 94(95) will occasionally appear in a place where you would have expected something else. This is not a mistake but an allowable variation.
One final point about the Office of Readings: Universalis is based on the 1985 edition of the Latin Breviary, which is a bit of a mess in that the General Introduction refers to a 2-year cycle of Scripture and patristic readings but never specifies it; and the texts in the breviary itself are for a 1-year cycle. Universalis therefore does this 1-year cycle of readings. Now that details of 2-year cycles are more widely available, Universalis mayat some point switch to a 2-year cycle, but given the amount of translation that needs to be done, this won't happen at once.
If Universalis appears to get stuck on a particular date, and it stays the same day after day, this is not a fault in the site, but a problem at your end.
http://www.universalis.com/). If it has an 8-digit number
in it somewhere (something like /20020111/) then that is an explicit
date. Try going back to just plain http://www.universalis.com
and navigate from there. (If you see something like /0100/ or
/-0500/ then don't worry, because that is a time zone and not
a date).It is called the Liturgy of the Hours because the different parts of it are intended for different hours of the day. In "Divine Office", the word "Office" has its older meaning of "function, purpose, duty". "Breviary" has the same root as "abbreviation". It is so called because it is a single compendium that brings together antiphonals, lectionaries, responsories, and other sources of liturgical materials.
The Invitatory Psalm opens the whole Office of each day: it calls us together to pray and praise God throughout the day's work. You should recite it at the beginning of the first Hour that you say each day. We provide two versions of Morning Prayer and the Office of Readings, one including the Invitatory Psalm and the other omitting it.
The Liturgy gives you two options with the Invitatory Psalm. Either you can use Psalm 94(95) always, or you can choose between Psalms 94(95), 99(100), 66(67), and 23(24). On the Universalis Web site, we use the latter approach because it gives more variety; but if you use Universalis from a mobile phone, we always stick to Psalm 94(95) to reduce the amount of text that has to be sent to the phone (the idea is that you can print out the psalm or even memorise it, since it doesn't change from one day to the next).
The Scripture readings are from the Jerusalem Bible. The Jerusalem Bible is authorised for liturgical use at Mass in the United Kingdom and in several other parts of the English-speaking world. (By the way, if you are thinking of buying a bible, you should be aware that the New Jerusalem Bible is different from the Jerusalem Bible).
The psalms are our own specially-commissioned translation. The translations of the non-biblical readings of the Office of Readings are from various sources.
Hebrew bibles and Greek/Latin bibles number the psalms differently.
| Greek | Hebrew |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 |
| ... | ... |
| 8 | 8 |
| 9 | 9 and 10 |
| 10 | 11 |
| ... | ... |
| 112 | 113 |
| 113 | 114 and 115 |
| 114 and 115 | 116 |
| 116 | 117 |
| ... | ... |
| 145 | 146 |
| 146 and 147 | 147 |
| 148 | 148 |
| 149 | 149 |
| 150 | 150 |
The Greek numbering tends to get used for liturgical purposes, and the Hebrew for scriptural studies. On the Universalis site, we quote both numbers, Greek first and then Hebrew: eg. Psalm 94(95).
Partly because the proprietors of other translations are terrified of exposing their work to the Internet and refuse to allow it, but also because we believe ours to be better for its purpose, which is private recitation and meditation.
We are happy for you to do this. However, you should bear in mind that our versions of the texts are not all officially approved translations, and that some parts of the Liturgy (eg. responsories, antiphons, concluding prayers) are not yet present on the site. [The Bible texts are from the Jerusalem Bible, which is officially approved for liturgical use in the United Kingdom and possibly elsewhere.] How much this affects you is up to your conscience and to the conscience of those who imposed the obligation on you. You might feel that this site was a resource to be used in the absence of your breviary, but not as a substitute for it if you had it with you.
You are welcome to do so.
We have to be a bit careful here. We do not want you to do anything that might infringe or weaken our copyright, so we must ask you to contact us before you reproduce anything. We'll normally be happy to let you reproduce as long as (a) you don't do it for gain and (b) you credit us, with our Web address (www.universalis.com) and (c) we judge the quantity, frequency, and purpose to be reasonable.
No.
You are very welcome to do so. If you would like a link from us to you, you have only to ask.
Everyone who has heard of the project has been enthusiastic and supportive, from parish priests and religious to senior figures in the Church. However, there is a limited list of official translations, and the one we use is not one of those: accordingly, the site cannot receive official approval. We believe that this is unfortunate, but we fully understand the reasons for this policy and support its application.
These aren't included. We'll look at adding them once the rest of the content (notably the Second Readings) is complete.
These, too, are on their way. Meanwhile, you can see the short Bible readings for the Little Hours in the About Today page.
The owners of the Responsorial Psalm don't allow it to be published on the Internet.
Go to the calendar page.
Go to the bottom of the page and make sure that the local calendar in "Calendar used" is the one you want.
At the bottom of the page, press the button marked "Add to Google Calendar".
Different localities have different local calendars of their own. These have some local feasts, and occasionally transfer celebrations of the General Calendar to a different date. Use our Location page to choose the calendar nearest yours (like most parts of Universalis, this is a work in progress and is slowly growing).
In some parts of the United States, the bishops have decided to move the solemnity of the Ascension from a Thursday to the following Sunday. In other parts, they have kept the Ascension on a Thursday. It is not our job to rule on the merits of these alternatives, so we give you both choices. At the time that this FAQ was last revised, there was quite an informative article here about the calendar changes.
The main reason that we started using .com is that most people with limited experience of the Internet believe that all Web addresses are of the form www.SOMETHING.com, and using an address of this form makes our site easier for everyone to remember.
When you use our Books page to buy books from Amazon, they give us a small commission. This helps to cover some of our expenses. If you are buying books of any kind, do please use this link, because it helps us and it doesn't cost you any more.
When you decide to download the whole of Universalis, for use on a PC or a hand-held computer, we charge you for a registration code that unlocks the downloaded version. See the Download page for details.
Otherwise Universalis is free.
No, we do not: at present we publish only on the Web. If you look at our Books page, you will see a list of relevant liturgical books.
At the time of writing, the latest English editions appear to be based on the version of the Divine Office promulgated on 11 April 1971. Some revisions were made in 1985, and these are included in the current (second) Latin edition; the revisions, however, are not very extensive, and, given the cost of printing revised books, they may not appear in English for some time.
See About Universalis Publishing, which tells you something about us and has links to background information.
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