Book review: Monastic Breviary Matins**updated

I've left this book to last because, as you will have gathered from my comments through the series, my view is that it is better to use Latin for Matins, and use officially approved books as far as possible.

Accordingly, my personal recommendation is that if you want to pray this hour liturgically, you buy a 1963 breviary (or if that is unavailable, one to as close to that date as possible).  If there is a group of you, just buy one breviary, and use the Psautier Monastique for the psalms and standard prayers.

If you are happy to do it devotionally (in English), the best options in my view are to:

• use Divinum Officium; or 
• the Clear Creek booklet for the psalms and main prayers, in combination with the Liturgical Readings book.

But I am well aware that for many people, this book will seem a more practical option.

Monastic Breviary MATINS according to the Holy Rule of Saint Benedict With additional rubrics and devotions for its recitation in accordance with the book of Common Prayer and Monastic Diurnal, Society of the Sacred Cross, 1961.

What it is

The book (MBM) is published by Lancelot Andrewes Press, an Orthodox printing press, using an Anglican text.  The psalm translation is Coverdale; Scriptural readings King James Version.

The rubrics largely reflect the pre-1955 breviary, so the calendar includes many Octaves, as well as a lot of very distinctly English and Anglican feasts.

What it contains

MBM contains all of the texts necessary to say a form of Matins in English only.

The Sunday cycle does not always align with the Roman/Benedictine 1963 calendar - the Sundays after Trinity Sunday for example contain quite different Gospels and Third Nocturn readings (presuambly it is an older Anglican schema).  It also omits many of the feasts of the 1963 calendar.

Pros and cons

As noted above, if you want to pray some form of Matins devotionally, want more than just the psalms and weekday texts that the Clear Creek book provides, and your Latin is not up to the task, then this is an option to consider.  As a traditionalist Catholic, however, I can't recommend it!

My basic problem with it is that while the translations are often very beautiful, they are often quite at odds with the Vulgate.

The book is potentially a useful source of translations of the readings and responsories for study purposes, but personally I have found the translations of many of the texts just a little looser than seems desirable to me. I have to admit I had hoped to use this as at least a reference point for translations for missing responsories from Divinum Officium, as these at least seem to be out of copyright.  But on the feast of St Benedict, for example, where most of the responsories are adaptations of St Gregory's Dialogues, the versions provided in the MBM have often left in words cut out in the Latin, or otherwise failed to reflect the text of the responsory, as opposed to the text of the Dialogues.  Accordingly I gave up and went back to the Dialogues and a standard translation of them, and started from scratch again for myself.

From a practical point of view, like most breviaries it is not particularly user friendly, made even less so than others by separating out the responsories for Sundays into a separate section for much of the year.

In addition, the rubrics, for some strange reason, are in black, not red.

Nonetheless, others have successfully used this book, and many take a much more positive view of it, so if you would like to read a more positive appreciation of it, go here.