Liturgy of the Hours at Boston College

There is a liturgy of the hours group at Boston College which meets on Tuesday and Thursday mornings after the 8:00 AM Mass to pray morning prayer. It was started by a Jesuit, Father Tony Corcoran, last year. He is now a missionary in Siberia. At first, the prayers and psalms were simply taken from the ordinary, but when he left us for Russia, he said that at some point we should begin to add the feast days of the saints. Sadly, many people at BC are opposed to doing the office as prescribed by Mother Church. They use the fact that the office is difficult to do properly (it involves flipping of pages) and that Father didn't make us do it fully as an excuse. Of course, as I mentioned, Father said someday we would begin doing the full version. It makes perfect sense of beginners to start out slowly, but Boston College students are some of the brightest in the country and certainly capable of learning the rubrics properly.

That isn't to say we won't make mistakes as we stumble through it or need to ask questions, but it is worth doing correctly. Holy Mother Church gives us the saint days and seasons to mark our year and celebrate the life of our Lord and the history of the Church. To ignore them continually turns into iconoclasm and is horribly not Catholic. Furthermore, the Liturgy of the Hours are in fact liturgy when someone ordained is praying. We must always keep in mind that the liturgy does not belong to any one person but to the Church, as expressed by our Holy Father in his great book The Spirit of the Liturgy and we have no right to change it. We live it. Our love for our Lord and His Church should cause us to make the effort. It's worth trying to do it right even if that involves making mistakes.