The Liturgy of the Hours
The prayer of the psalms at set times of day, obligatory for clergy and open to anyone.
Also called the Divine Office, this is the Church's daily round of psalms, hymns, Scripture, and intercessions at set hours. Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer anchor the cycle, with Night Prayer and other hours around them. Bishops, priests, deacons, and members of religious orders commit to it daily; laypeople are encouraged to pray it as well, especially the morning and evening hours.
The Liturgy of the Hours divides the day into offices, chiefly Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer and an office of readings, with shorter hours between. Its substance is the psalms, distributed across a four-week cycle so that a person praying it works through most of the psalter regularly.
Clergy and religious are obliged to pray it. Lay Catholics increasingly do, and the practice of praying just Morning and Evening Prayer is common among people who would not attempt the whole thing.
It is the oldest continuously kept rhythm in Western Christianity, and its logic is the same one behind the Jewish daily services: prayer set by the clock rather than by the mood.
Does it have a text?
A fixed text, published as the Breviary, and every current edition is in copyright. The psalms it is built from are out of copyright in older translations, and this site holds several in the Coverdale and Douay-Rheims versions, though not arranged into the offices.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Catholic
- The Mass — The central act of Catholic worship, fixed in text and repeated daily worldwide.
- The Rosary — A counted devotion pairing repeated prayers with meditation on events in the life of Christ.
- Novenas — Nine days of prayer for a particular intention, usually to a particular saint.
- Eucharistic Adoration — Prayer before the exposed sacrament, often silent and often for a set hour.
- Catholic personal and meditative prayer — Prayer in a person's own words, and the meditative disciplines the tradition teaches.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.