Benedict’s Day in Retrospect

You might remember that I’ve been using the 1962 “A Short Breviary” for my daily office lately. Calendar issues aside, it has been a fruitful experience. Yesterday, however, I ran into a bit of a snag.

Yesterday was the Feast of Saint Benedict. I didn’t expect to find an office commemorating his feast on the day, since before the calendar reforms his feast was celebrated on 21 March. (We Benedictines still celebrate that day as well. You can’t have too many feasts, I say!)

I figured I’d just use the office for 21 March and call it good.

Except there wasn’t one.

You have to understand just how bizarre this is. The breviary I’m using was developed by the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Saint John in Collegeville, Minnesota. Why on earth would Benedictines not have an office for Saint Benedict?

I could even find memorial prayers for Saint Scholastica, his sister, but for Benedict – nothing.

That’s like the Daughters of the American Revolution ignoring the Fourth of July.

In the end, I prayed the Matins and Lauds of the day. For Vespers, I downloaded antiphons and prayers for the feast (a “greater double” feast apparently) from the four volume Bute English translation of the Roman Breviary of 1908, which can be found on Archive.org.

Not an ideal solution. I can only think that I’ve overlooked something entirely obvious in the little breviary.

Now normally I attend daily Mass on Tuesdays and Thursdays near my office in downtown Seattle. I attended yesterday (Wednesday), both because I had missed Tuesday and because it was the Feast of Saint Benedict. I’m very glad I did.

Mass was celebrated by a young bearded priest I don’t remember seeing before. Judging by the white hood poking out from his heavy gold vestments, he was a Dominican.

Mass was strictly by the book. Confiteor (almost unheard of there at daily Mass), the Kyrie in Greek, chanted Alleluia.

The priest absolutely came alive at the homily. By turns serious and amusingly self-deprecating, he tied the readings together and ended with a serious and rousing exhortation to preach the Gospel to the 80% of Catholics that don’t attend Mass.

He called us to an interior evangelization – which is of course exactly what Saint Benedict did in with his monks, living amid the ruins of Roman civilization.