Jul 12, 2025

USCCB Transmits Liturgy of the Hours, Second Edition to Holy See

Six months after the final vote on its elements by the body of bishops, the manuscript and accompanying documentation of the Liturgy of the Hours, Second Edition was transmitted to the Holy See’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments on May 29, 2025, the memorial of Pope St. Paul VI. The Committee on Divine Worship, meanwhile, continues to plan for the implementation of the new translation of the Divine Office once it is confirmed.

Previous updates on the progress of the breviary were given in the March 2015 and January 2022 issues of the Newsletter. The Secretariat of Divine Worship now provides this latest update as excitement continues to build for this important ritual text.

USCCB Approvals since 2022

Most non-Scriptural elements of the Liturgy of the Hours were translated by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL). Its translation of the Ordinary—principal rubrics for celebrating the Hours—was approved by the USCCB in June 2023. From 2023 to 2024, ICEL also provided two large fascicles of extra materials not originally foreseen by the USCCB scope of work approved in 2012. These materials included new translations of the General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours, antiphons, hagiographical introductions of the saints, introductions to the Lord’s Prayer, long and short responsories, psalm titles and headings, rubrics, and versicles. The goal was to provide translations that were harmonious with the elements already prepared and approved, as well as consistent with existing liturgical translations. These fascicles, entitled “Supplementary Texts” and “Additional Texts,” were thoroughly reviewed by the Committee and Secretariat prior to final modification and approval by the USCCB at their June 2024 plenary meeting.

Meanwhile, work progressed on elements proper to the dioceses of the United States. Texts related to U.S. saints and blesseds—mostly Second Readings for the Office of Readings—were researched and consolidated into a fascicle, and additional textual and ritual adaptations for use in this country were developed into a second fascicle. These texts were approved in June and November 2023, respectively.

Finally, the Doctrine Subcommittee on the Translation of Scripture Text completed its work on revisions to the New American Bible, Revised Edition. A biblical text consisting of the 2010 Old Testament, 2018 Abbey Psalms and Canticles, and 2024 New Testament was approved by the USCCB Administrative Committee for devotional use of the faithful in September 2024, and the body of bishops approved it two months later to serve as the liturgical Bible for the United States. As reported in the April 2025 Newsletter, the liturgical Bible was confirmed by the Holy See on April 13, and work is proceeding on the Bible’s publication. Readings from the liturgical Bible were incorporated into the manuscript of the breviary, and they will also form the core of the future Lectionary for Mass. […]

Preparing the Final Manuscript

A preliminary submission containing a large tranche of material and documentation was transmitted to the Dicastery in January 2024 for its officials to begin reviewing the modifications and general indications proposed by the USCCB. The final submission sent this month included amendments and documentation for the ICEL Supplementary and Additional Texts, plus the complete manuscripts of the four volumes of the Liturgy of the Hours. Preparing manuscripts of this magnitude—while maintaining the usual high level of thorough editorial review to ensure that the bishops’ amendments and other decisions were accurately included—was a great challenge for the Secretariat of Divine Worship.

The unique structure of the Liturgy of the Hours, compared to the other books of the Roman Rite liturgy, resulted in an equally unique process of translation by ICEL and review by the USCCB. Like the Roman Missal, Third Edition, the text was translated, reviewed, and approved in parts over a long period of time. Because individual elements of the text are often repeated and reused, even between volumes, ICEL provided its translations grouped by type: hymns, antiphons, responsories, prayers, etc., rather than producing one manuscript translation of the editio typica. This grouping of translations by type allowed these individual elements of the breviary to be organized into tables where they could be sorted and compared to one another as part of the review process to ensure consistency, eliminate duplicates, and correct variant translations of the same Latin text.

Texts not translated by ICEL, namely the Abbey Psalms and Canticles, readings from Sacred Scripture, miscellaneous headings, and U.S. proper texts and adaptations were also put into tables to simplify review. Scripture readings were pulled automatically from a draft digital format of the liturgical Bible prepared to aid the bishops in their own review of the text for approval.

Not counting duplicates, these tables contain:

2,252 antiphons,
1,171 responsories,
974 Scripture readings, not including psalms and canticles,
646 Second Readings for the Office of Readings,
585 prayers (511 drawn from the Roman Missal and 74 unique to the Divine Office),
308 versicles,
297 hymns,
279 sets of intercessions, and
206 hagiographical introductions of the saints, along with well over a thousand individual rubrics and headings scattered across the four volumes.

Because of this unique process, the final vote of the bishops in November 2024 did not immediately result in a completed manuscript as with other liturgical books. Over the months that followed, the Secretariat was tasked with assembling a complete, four-volume book to be submitted to the Holy See for confirmation. To accomplish this, the tables used for organizing the texts as part of the original review and modification process were compiled into a database with every single piece of text in Latin and English given a unique identification code, and a series of spreadsheets were drawn up to specify the order in which every text should be placed in the breviary. A program was then created to “pull” texts from the database, format them, and place them into a completed manuscript. This process ensured that during the Secretariat’s editorial review, all corrections could be made in the database of texts, with those changes then propagating to all instances of that element across all four volumes.

The Secretariat expects that the program it developed will continue to prove useful in future projects. When the Holy See grants confirmation to the Liturgy of the Hours, Second Edition, any changes required by the Dicastery can be quickly implemented, reducing any delay to this already long-promised project. The spreadsheets that provide the layout information can be filtered by day and hour, and can greatly simplify the production of manuscripts for popular extracts such as Christian Prayer that are accurate and consistent with the text of the full four-volume set. Preliminary work has already begun to adapt this process for the forthcoming Lectionary for Mass in English and Spanish so as to reduce the time needed to produce final manuscripts for those works.

Conclusion

The Committee on Divine Worship and its Secretariat continue to make publication plans for the Liturgy of the Hours, Second Edition, including drawing up timelines and approving the publishers of the four-volume edition. The final publication phase, however, can only begin after confirmation by the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. One possible timeline that projects confirmation by the end of this year could result in printed books in 2027 and 2028. A longer wait for confirmation will necessarily mean that volumes are printed later. Nevertheless, the USCCB is actively preparing for a fruitful implementation of the Divine Office for both clergy and lay faithful, so that the praise of God may continue without ceasing among all his people.