Breviarium Meum: for the iPhone and iPod touch

Breviarium Meum allows you to pray the traditional (1962) Latin breviary of the Catholic Church wherever you go. Just pull out your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, select the hour to pray, and begin. You can download the texts up to a week in advance, so you can pray even when you don't have a network connection. So if you’re on a mountain top making a retreat, or down in a valley to celebrate Mass in an isolated village, you can still keep up with the office, even if you left your printed breviary at home.

Are you unfamiliar with the old breviary? It’s a part of your heritage, and one that you have a right to know about and experience. As the instruction Universae Ecclesiae reaffirms, one goal of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum was to offer “to all the faithful the Roman Liturgy in the Usus Antiquior, considered as a precious treasure to be preserved” (8a).

This app is the easiest way to pray the breviary. It gives you all the texts in order, so you don’t have to flip back and forth as you would with a printed breviary. If the text is too small, you can make it bigger. If you don’t understand the Latin, you can display a parallel English translation.

Those more familiar with the breviary, and especially priests, will be pleased to see we’ve included a selection of prayers and blessings in Latin, such as are normally found in the appendix of a breviary.

Breviarium Meum HD: for the iPad

Breviarium Meum HD is the iPad version of Breviarium Meum. A separate app makes it easier for us to take advantage of special characteristics of the iPad. The most obvious of these is the larger display, ideal for viewing Latin and English side-by-side. We've also added forward and back buttons to navigate among the hours and prayers. If you accidentally load something, the back button will restore what you were previously viewing, so you won't lose your place.

Rubrical changes

The texts presented by the app are based on those prepared by the Divinum Officium Project, and in most cases, we follow the changes they make. Recent changes have given a different meaning to two of the choices in the app for rubrics, namely those currently (version 1.8) labeled “Pre-Trent Monastic” and “1960 rubrics with 2009 calendar.”

The Monastic option will be modeled on the 1963 Monastic breviary. Previously, it was a reconstruction of the pre-Trent office for the purpose of comparing it with other historical versions. This change will make it more useful for monks who pray the traditional Benedictine office today. It also means that there will be an actual printed edition to use as a model. Work on this is in progress.

The “1960 rubrics with 2009 calendar” was an experimental version prepared in the latter year: it used the Novus Ordo sanctoral cycle with the 1960 rubrics and temporal cycle. In 2011, Universae Ecclesiae indicated that an official solution would be forthcoming, and finally on 25 March 2020, CDF decree Cum sanctissima (dated 22 February 2020) was published. This option has therefore been changed to conform to Cum sanctissima. If you wish to take advantage of the provisions of the decree, and the saint you wish to celebrate is in the Novus Ordo calendar of the United States, then this option will allow you to celebrate the saint and make any necessary commemorations. Since the changes are recent, it seems prudent to beware of possible errors, in particular missing commemorations.

For more information on the rubrical versions available, see the details on the Divinum Officium Project website.