u/cwong15

I thought I'd share interior pictures of the version of Christian Prayer by Pauline Books and Media, the publishing arm of the Daughters of St Paul. Though a new translation is imminent, this book is IMHO still relevant because:

• people wonder how a Major Extract could deliver morning, daytime, evening and night prayers in 1 volume, as MTF is promising
• if you like your psalm-prayers, well, this book has the full psalter and the corresponding psalm-prayers that will be gone from the new translation

I've started with the outside (stacked on top of my St Paul Daily Missal), table of contents, Proper of Seasons, Psalter and a page from the Missal to contrast.

The good

It's remarkable how a book this small and this thin (1758 pages) could fit so much. In the first picture, I have it stacked on top of the St Paul Daily Missal, which has 2696 pages. It contains 300 or so pages of OOR content that does not belong in a true diurnal. Yet unlike the CBPC Christian Prayer, it has the Daytime prayers fully integrated into the propers and psalter. This includes the hymns, psalmody, readings, antiphons, responsory and concluding prayers. Essentially, you can pray everything but OOR from this 1 volume.

It has some useful navigation features:

• Proper hymns: hymns are located inline in the propers and psalter. There's no big generic hymns section. This has a cost: some hymns are duplicated 3-4 times.
• Inline Gospel canticles: the Magnificat and Benedictus are printed in every day of the 28 day psalter.
• Antiphons are printed both before and after each psalm, unlike the CBPC version.

The bad

• There are places that say to look at the 4-vol LOTH for more hymns. Obviously, they left out a few.
• Not all the options are there. I was taken aback when exiting the Easter season, and the Proper of Seasons for Ordinary Time is pretty bare (see pics). I've seen multiple concluding prayers on iBreviary where there is only one in this book.
• I don't see the point of the Office of Readings selection. It's hard to actually use them.
• The Responsories are almost cryptic in their use of ellipses.

The ugly

This is an ugly book. It's single-color sans serif throughout. Sans serif is an awful choice for body text. These are compact fonts, featuring a big x-height to maintain legibility at tiny point sizes. But it's not pretty. At this point I'm thoroughly sick of the typeface. Do you think it's a coincidence that the LOTHv2 set I picked has no sans serif?

It likes to use 2-column layouts all over the place. While the main psalter is single-column, proper psalmody are all 2-col in a smaller font. This book is IMHO too small for a 2-column layout. Frequently lines of a hymn double because they have to wrap, so they basically uglified the hymn presentation for little or no space saving. The layout looks cramped and crowded.

The final picture I uploaded is from the St Paul Daily Missal. Same publisher, same dimensions. But it looks far less amateurish.

Speculation on Major Extracts

We know the Major Extracts are on their way. Imagine if we took this Christian Prayer book, threw out the 300 pages of useless OOR content, and gave it another 1000 pages. Imagine what we could get as a result.

But there are some headwinds. The LOTHv2 content has increased over the previous version. That's why the Ascension vol II is so thick, I suppose. The WoF guy blames this increased word count on:

• Greatly expanded Proper of Saints
• Proper hymns
• Antiphons for Gospel canticles for all years A, B and C

We've speculated on possibly dropping optional memorials. Another area that MTF et al will look at is the proper hymns: where hymns are no longer in a hymns section but inserted into the right locations in the propers. The trouble with that might be the duplication. To save space, Major Extracts might need to take a step backwards and put all hymns into a dedicated hymns section, like the CBPC Christian Prayer today.