Aside from the brevaries suggested by The North American Association of Benedictine Oblate Directors, Oblates have used other volumes based on their traditions and preferences.
The Monastic Diurnal (St. Michael’s Abbey Press): A diurnal includes all the traditional hours of the Divine Office except the Office of Matins. The Monastic Diurnal was created for the sake of Oblates and Benedictine Religious who must travel outside the monastery for the day and that is why the Office of Matins is left out. Including Matins for the traveling Benedictine would be unnecessary because the presumption would be that the religious would return before nightfall. Most Oblates would not be able to pray Matins simply because it is too long and quite complicated.
This Monastic Diurnal is a 1963 re-print and it follows the psalm cursus (schedule) outlined in the Rule of St. Benedict. Therefore one finds seven psalms and one Old Testament Canticle for the hour of Lauds, three psalms for each of the day hours (Prime/First Hour, Terce/Mid-morning, Sext/Mid-day, None/mid-afternoon). Vespers has 3-5 psalms and Compline has the same three psalms each night (4, 90(91), 133(134)).
St. Benedict insisted that the monks should pray all 150 psalms a week, so the 1963 monastic office has a weekly psalter. However since the Office of Matins is not included in the diurnal then obviously the great number of psalms proper to that office are not in this particular breviary and that is the only major drawback of the Monastic Diurnal in my estimation. The Monastic Diurnal does include the full Office of the Dead (including the Matins portion of that Office), the Penitential Psalms with the Litany, the Itinerary (prayer service for traveling) and a few other special prayer supplements.
This diurnal would be a necessary tool for worship if one were to visit the Benedictine monasteries who still maintain the traditional monastic office such as Fontgombeault (France), Norcia (Italy), Farnborough (England), or Clear Creek here in the United States.
The Monastic Diurnal follows generally the 1962 Roman Rite Calendar that is maintained by those parishes that offer the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite (Traditional Latin Mass). Therefore some feast days are celebrated on different days than one would find on the new Roman Rite Calendar. The collects (closing prayer), antiphons, and Scripture readings in the monastic office are identical to those found in the 1962 Roman Breviary and the diurnal itself is printed in both Latin and English in side-by-side columns.
Matthew Hanes
