Vatican website translation:<\/p>\n
98. Members of any institute dedicated to acquiring perfection who, according to their constitutions, are to recite any parts of the divine office are thereby performing the public prayer of the Church.
\nThey too perform the public prayer of the Church who, in virtue of their constitutions, recite any short office, provided this is drawn up after the pattern of the divine office and is duly approved.<\/p>\n
Latin text:<\/p>\n
98. Sodales cuiusvis Instituti status perfectionis, qui, vi Constitutionum, partes aliquas divini Officii absolvunt, orationem publicam Ecclesiae agunt.<\/strong> Slavishly literal translation:<\/p>\n 98. Members of whatever Institute of a state of perfection, who, by the force of their Constitutions, are bound to any parts of the Divine Office, do the public prayer of the Church. Continuing the Council Fathers\u2019 discussion of what would constitute a proper substitution for the Liturgy of the Hours for individuals, attention now turns to those religious communities who are not bound to pray the entire Office each day. Even though their constitutions may call their members (outside of clerics bound to the entire Office) to pray only segments of the Office (e.g., perhaps only Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer and Night Prayer), they are nonetheless praying in the name of the Church. This raises the thorny question of how to determine the various \u201ccategories\u201d of the Church\u2019s prayer: liturgy, para-liturgy, devotions, pious exercises, group prayer, etc. There had been an argument that for a ritual prayer form to rise to the level of liturgy, it had to be not only regulated by the Church\u2019s official liturgical books, but also had to be presided over by a cleric. This would relegate the Offices of women\u2019s communities to the status of para-liturgy, even though those communities might pray exactly the same texts as those in the official liturgical books as long as no cleric presided over their common prayer. (A similar earlier categorization appeared to make choirs of males [because they were all potentially clerics] genuine \u201cliturgical\u201d choirs while \u201cmixed\u201d choirs and those totally composed of women were considered \u201cpara-liturgical\u201d choirs, even though their repertoire might be the same.) That understanding is challenged here by the Council Fathers stating that any who join in the official prayer of the Church act as agents of the Church\u2019s liturgy.<\/p>\n The second sentence acknowledges the development of various \u201cLittle Offices\u201d (of the Holy Spirit, of the Cross, of the Passion, of the Sacred Heart, etc.) whose invariable content usually made those hours easier to memorize in contrast to the high variability of the official Divine Office. Probably the most famous and employed of the \u201cLittle Offices\u201d was that of the Blessed Virgin Mary, often adopted by active religious communities whose pastoral responsibilities made recitation of even portions of the variable Divine Office too burdensome. (Since \u201cLittle Offices\u201d were also attractive to devout laity, they sometimes appeared in the vernacular.) Usually praying a \u201cLittle Office\u201d was considered a devotional exercise (like the recitation of the rosary) rather than genuinely liturgical prayer, prayed \u201cin the name of the Church,\u201d but the Council Fathers take the opposite tack.<\/p>\n Pray Tell readers might want to discuss the relative merits of adaptations of the official Divine Office such as Morning Praise and Evensong<\/em>, Praise God in Song<\/em>, and the Liturgy of the Hours sections in contemporary hymnals for individual and communal prayer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Vatican website translation: 98. Members of any institute dedicated to acquiring perfection who, according to their constitutions, are to recite any parts of the divine office are thereby performing the public prayer of the Church. They too perform the public prayer of the Church who, in virtue of their constitutions, recite any short office, provided […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18,3814,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liturgy-of-the-hours","category-re-reading-sacrosanctum-concilium","category-vatican-ii"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n Item, publicam Ecclesiae orationem agunt, si quod parvum Officium, vi Constitutionum, recitant, dummodo in modum Officii divini confectum ac rite approbatum sit.<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nLikewise, they do the public prayer of the Church if they recite that \u201cLittle Office,\u201d by force of their Constitutions, as long as it is created in the structure of the Divine Office and is rightly approved.<\/p>\n