Back to the BCP

I stayed with the Roman Catholic breviary for about three weeks.
The deciding factors for my return to the Book of Common Prayer Daily Office are three:
- Continuous reading of Scripture, including the Gospels as well as Old Testament and Epistles
- Continuous reading of the Psalmody, including the untidy bits
- The "Rite One" traditional language, and the Authorized/King James Biblical texts

There was a point to Cranmer's reform of the Offices, and not just the benefit of putting them into the vernacular. In the Anglican forms, I think that one gets a better overall formation in Scripture than one would get from the Roman Catholic version, simply by the repeated reading of whole books of the Bible over the years, and reading them from an actual Bible, not broken up into little bits and disconnected from the rest of the Story. There is not enough continuity in the Roman Offices to get a sense of any of the Scriptural books as a whole. And (as I said in the previous posting) no Gospels, beyond disconnected single verses in the Hours other than the Office of Readings. That could all be corrected by additional study outside of the Hours, but I can see that I would not make the time to do that.

And I am an old dog; I do not easily learn new tricks. Better for me to stay with what has brought me thus far.