Review: CTS Sunday Missal

Every US Catholic book publisher should look at this missal, and then hang their heads in shame.

The Catholic Truth Society Sunday Missal cost me less to have it shipped from England than it would to buy an American one, either online or in a brick and mortar store. And it’s much, much nicer than anything I’ve seen in the bookstores. It arrived on Good Friday, just in time for the Easter Vigil.

Things I like:

1. Save the readings, the missal provides everything in Latin alongside the new English translation. I’m not a big demander of Latin, but I do think it’s eminently appropriate that the Latin be provided next to its English translation. Also, it might come in handy some day.

2. This missal has real sacred art. There is, admittedly, not a large quantity, only five plates. But they are full color, gorgeous reproductions from the Ingeborg Psalter. I will happily accept quality over quantity.

3. Most Sundays and feasts begin with a short introduction by either Pope Benedict XVI or Pope John Paul II.

4. It’s sturdily and attractively bound for such an inexpensive volume. It lays open very nicely, although it is a little stiff in the front and back at first. The pages aren’t gilded, so the red stripe that marks the Ordinary shows up clearly, making it very easy to find.

5. Before and after the Ordinary are brief sections on Preparation for Mass and Thanksgiving after Mass. My last missal had these sections so buried I didn’t even know they were there till I checked just now.

6. Reading this missal is extremely easy on the eyes. This seems to be a combination of a variety of variables, such as the font, the page layout, the color of paper and print. My poor eyes are extremely grateful.

Things I don’t like:

1. That’s it’s not approved for use here in the US. It wouldn’t be fair to hold that against it, though. All it seems to be missing are the US patronal feasts, and since that’s only Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12th, a small insert in the back will fix it.

2. The other impediment to using this missal in the US is that the lectionary readings are from the Jerusalem Bible, which isn’t approved for liturgical use here. This isn’t a huge issue for me, as I prefer to read either ahead of time or afterwards and listen to the readings and Gospel as they are proclaimed in Mass. I have found no other differences between the CTS Sunday Missal and the texts in the US missal.

3. Would it have killed them to add just one more ribbon? (Yellow, to balance the red and blue, please.) While we’re on the subject of ribbons, the ribbons are my only qualm about the missal’s quality. They look like they will fall out, and sooner rather than later. I guess when they do, I can add my yellow ribbon.

Verdict: 5 stars if you don’t care about the lectionary accuracy. 4 stars if you do.

CTS has a similar Daily Missal as well, but that missal would be missing a substantially greater amount of material, and so I probably won’t splurge on it. I do wish someone could publish something this nice for the US though.

 

Review: Daytime Prayer

Daytime Prayer contains the complete hours of Terce, Sext, and None in a slim volume suitable for tucking into a purse or briefcase. it makes an excellent companion volume for devotees of the Divine Office who use either the four volume set of the Liturgy of the Hours or the single volume Christian Prayer. However, this book also has a significant flaw. It does not impede the book’s use by one who is accustomed to praying the daytime hours, but they present a significant source of confusion for the novice.

The book is roughly the same length and width as Christian Prayer, but only half an inch thick. It is bound in the same red imitation leather, with red edged pages and a single ribbon. It could really use a second ribbon, but I suspect the book’s slimness made this impossible. The pages of the psalter are bordered with a red stripe, but as all of the pages are red edged, this does not actually assist in opening the book straight to the psalter. The artwork is in the typical ugly Catholic Book Publishing Company style, unfortunate but expected.

Internally, the book is organized in a similar fashion to Christian Prayer: Proper of Seasons, Solemnities of the Lord in Ordinary Time, four week Psalter, Proper of Saints. There are two appendices, the complementary psalter and a selection of hymns. The book does not contain the newly translated collects. I doubt we will see updated collects until there is a revised translation of the breviary itself. There is no seperate Ordinary, the opening and closing of these hous is merely included in each day of the psalter. The Proper of Seasons is differently organized, but easy enough to understand. The introduction provides excellent instructions on how to pray the daytime hours. Everything is easy to use and understand, except the complimentary psalmody.

There are almost no instructions given on how to correctly use the complementary psalmody. The complementary psalmody contains three sets of three psalms to be said at the two daytime hours that the current psalmody is not said. The complemenary psalmody is also used at every hour on Solemnities. However these psalms also appear elsewhere in the Liturgy of the Hours, and if more than one daytime hour is prayed; there are special instructions on the use of the complementary psalmody at these times to prevent duplicating psalms in the course of the day. These instructions are completely absent from this book, and it caused me no end of confusion when psalms started repeating themselves. I eventually had to make notes in my four week psalter on which daytime hour should get the current psalmody and which sets of the complementary psalter to use for the other two hours.

Apart from this frustrating omission, Daytime Prayer is a fine book, simple to use and easily carried to make the daytime hours accessible even on a busy workday.

I wrote this review of Daytime Prayer for the free Catholic Book review program, created by Aquinas and More Catholic Goods, your source for Baptism Gifts and Oplatki Christmas Wafers.

Tiber River is the first Catholic book review site, started in 2000 to help you make informed decisions about Catholic book purchases.

I receive free product samples as compensation for writing reviews for Tiber River. (This particular book was bought on my own dime.)

My opinions, glowing or scathing, are always my own. I am incapable of changing them to make anyone happy, not even myself.

 

Toy Tales – Part 1

So I sat down this afternoon, gave myself about four hours, and wrote up a starter rule set for a toddler role playing game.  I figured that if it took longer than four hours, it was already too complicated for a toddler.  It didn’t even take that long to do.  I wrote it and got in a short nap!  It all came together so nicely that after dinner we all sat down to playtest.
 
And we encountered the first challenge.  GeekBaby doesn’t name any of his toys.  When i asked what his Bear’s name was, he said “Bear.”  I rolled with this, and started the story with how the bear had no name, and it made him sad, so he decided to go out into the world and look for a name.  GeekBaby decided the grocery store was the obvious place to look for the bear’s name, and that the best way to get to the grocery store was to stow away in the car. But he needed a flashlight to see in the dark.  So the bear rolled to climb up the dresser and got a flashlight, and we hit the second challenge.
 
My child doesn’t know his numbers!  He can count reasonably reliably (he tends to omit 5) and add or subtract one from concrete items in front of him without recounting them all (again, reasonably reliably for three).  But he doesn’t know 1 is one, much less 14 is fourteen.  Right away, all the math teaching moments went on the back burner.  He still likes to roll the dice, and I’ll honestly be content with him enjoying the role playing aspect of the game.
 
Anyhow, the bear made it up the dresser with ease, but foolishly turned on the flashlight right away and the little boy started to wake up.  If the boy sees the bear moving around, it’s game over!  After some prompting, and some discussion of putting on coats to go outside and play, the bear turned off the flashlight and tried to climb down the dresser.
 
It was harder to climb down the dresser with the flashlight, and the bear fell, which also disturbed the boy.  But since it was still dark, the bear could creep out of the room unseen, and escape.
 
And in the hallway was a shadow beast with long sharp shadow claws and glowing red eyes.  We had a little battle, during which sadly the flashlight was knocked out of the bear’s paws.  Things weren’t going well for the bear when Maverick showed up, zapped the shadow beast by turning on the flashlight, and saved the day.  (Maverick is a beanie baby leopard in a flight jacket.)
 
Around the battle with the shadow beast, I realized GeekBaby was getting tired (very little nap time today) and losing interest in the game.  He showed a lot of interest at first, I thought, but things had started to go downhill, so Himself jumped in playing Maverick, retrieved the flashlight, and ended the battle, and then it was time for bath and bed.
 
Things I learned:

1. Roll with your toddler being a little uncooperative.  GeekBaby has no interest in naming his toys, so I made the bear’s lack of a name the point of the story.  And GeekBaby got into that. 
2. Don’t push the math.  Allow them to do it if they’re inclined, and remember that the creative play of the story is good for them too.  GeekBaby doesn’t do very much creative play, and what he does do is entirely reenactments of things he’s seen.  Sometimes it’s creative, and sometimes it’s just exclamations over how Woody and his friends are going to be burnt up by the fire.  Chiefly, my kid just wants to do whatever I’m doing, which means he wants to play role playing games too.  So I’m using that desire to sneak more creative play into his diet. 
3. Always have a narrative way to defeat a challenge.  It didn’t initially occur to me to use the flashlight to defeat the shadow beast, Himself came up with that idea.  But it’s a good one, and if GeekBaby hadn’t been so tired we would have tried to gently lead him to the idea instead of Maverick saving the bear.  From now on there will be at least one narrative method of defeating challenges. 
4. Always be gauging your toddler’s attention and enjoyment and stop when he stops enjoying the game. 

Gaming Night!

We finally had another Star Wars game session tonight.  The GM had a rough college semester this past fall and didn’t have either the time or the energy to devote to the game, so we’ve been on hiatus since August.
 
A few hiccups at first, but I found my character sheet in the end, and finally remembered her name.  Kira Lassiter, ship’s medic.  We borrowed a big laser gun for the ship from some pirates, tracked down a missing cargo of donuts and donut making equipment, and did some other stuff that I missed because I was trying to con GeekBaby into napping, or otherwise keep him from being too disruptive.  It was a blast.
 
GeekBaby is desperate to play any game that we’re playing – in the Pandemic marathons of the Christmas holidays we had to give him a spare pawn and let him fly to different spots on the map to keep him happy.  I’m thinking he might be getting old enough to do a very basic, heavy on role playing, light on numbers sort of game.  I like the concept behind Fuzzy Heroes, especially the use of real toys as minis, but it’s still too numbers-heavy.  I have some alternate ideas though.  I want to encourage him in more creative play and he wants to play games like the grown ups, so this has lots of promise as an educational tool if I can get the mechanism just right.
 
Besides, he already has his own set of dice.

Review: The Office of Compline

The Liturgy of the Hours is unique among the devotions of the Church because it is liturgy, it unites the Church in prayer before God.  However the Liturgy of the Hours is also difficult to learn individually.  Compline is usually recommended as the easiest hour to begin praying, because it is shorter and repeats on a weekly cycle instead of a four week cycle.  This book is the best introduction to praying Compline and to the general structure of the Hours that I have ever found.

The Office of Compline is a sturdy hardcover volume, which looks like it will hold up well under many years of daily use.  The binding is strong with an attached ribbon marker, and the paper used is substantial.  The text is two tone, red and black, for instructions and prayers respectively.  Latin and English are provided on facing pages.  If Latin is being used, this permits one to follow along easily in English.

The most unique aspect of this book is that in addition to providing the office of Compline, it is also set to music for those who wish to sing their prayer.  While one is not required to sing, having the music available distinguishes The Office of Compline from Christian Prayer and the four volume set of the Liturgy of the Hours.  The chant settings supplied are beautiful, composed by Fr. Samuel Weber O.S.B. from the Institute of Sacred Music.  They look relatively simple to learn, if one is already familiar with chant.

The forward, by Cardinal Burke, discusses the importance of the Liturgy of the Hours in the Church, and the significance of Compline as the final prayer of the day.  It also illuminates the appropriateness of Compline in the domestic church as the prayer of the family before retiring.

After the forward, there is a clear set of directions for Compline where the appropriate postures and gestures are indicated for use in communal recitation.  The rest of the volume is divided up into sections:  the Ordinary, the prayers for each day of the week, and the hymnal.

The Ordinary contains the parts of Compline that do not typically change from day to day.  Some parts, especially the chant settings, do change according to the time of year, but the red text above each variation will direct you to the appropriate version for the current liturgical season.  The red text will also instruct you when to turn to the psalmody, readings, and prayer specific to each day.  Overall this section is laid out very clearly.

At the end of the Ordinary are five Marian antiphons in Latin, with chant settings.  This is one limitation of this volume.  Where every other section has both an English chant setting as well as a Latin one, the Marian antiphons only have chant settings in Latin.  There are English translations at the bottom of the page, but no music.  Four of these antiphons (Alma Redemptoris Mater,  Ave Regina Caelorum, Regina Caeli, and Salve Regina) have both a complex and a simple chant setting.  Sub Tuum Praesidium has only a simple setting.

The daily sections are somewhat more confusing, and this is caused by two problems in how the psalms are laid out with their chant settings.  The first problem lays in the musical notation for flex verses, which are verses with three lines that the music needs to accommodate.  In this volume, the first verse of the psalm is printed with chant setting indicating how the verses are to be sung.  Subsequent verses are pointed.  But Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday have psalms with flex verses.  The extra line of chant for this flex verse is just appended to the end of the first verse, regardless as to where the flex verse is actually located in the psalm.  This isn’t just a musical confusion.  The way it is currently laid out, it is entirely logical tack the flex verse on to the end of the first verse.  Wednesday’s second psalm is particularly confusing in this manner.  The second, and less severe, problem is that while every day’s psalmody has a different antiphon for Paschaltide, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday have completely different chant settings as well, and therefore the psalms are printed twice.  It is very easy for a beginner to become confused and say or sing the psalmody twice on these days.  Both of these confusions could have been minimized by using the standard practice of printing the antiphon chant notation with the psalm tone given at its end.  Thankfully, the remainder of the daily sections, the readings and prayers, are perfectly straightforward.

The last section is the hymnal.  While this section looks quite lengthy, it is primarily composed of different musical settings of the same two hymns, O Christ, Who Art The Light and Day, and Before the Ending of the Day for use during different times of the liturgical year.

Overall, in spite of the potential for confusion in the daily psalmody, this is the clearest version of Compline that I have ever encountered.  It remains accessible for those who wish to read Compline, while also providing the necessary resources to sing the hour.  It contains both Latin and English.  It is inexpensive compared to Christian Prayer, and easier for a beginner to learn from.  And it is a beautiful way to begin praying communally with your family.  If you are interested in either the Liturgy of the Hours, or developing a tradition of family prayer before bed, this book is an excellent resource.

You can purchase this book here.

I wrote this review of Office of Compline for the free Catholic Book review program, created by Aquinas and More Catholic Goods, your source for Baptism Gifts and Oplatki Christmas Wafers.

Tiber River is the first Catholic book review site, started in 2000 to help you make informed decisions about Catholic book purchases.  I receive free product samples as compensation for writing reviews for Tiber River.  But I paid for this book out of my own pocket because I wanted to learn to sing Compline.

My opinions, glowing or scathing, are always my own.  I am incapable of changing them to make anyone happy, not even myself.