Witness of the Saints: Patristic Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours (2012)

Witness of the Saints would almost seem to be a book not worth "writing" -- essentially, it takes the liturgical readings from the early church fathers and saints directly from the Liturgy of the Hours. Then those readings are chopped up and arranged topically, using the Catechism of the Catholic Church as an organizing structure. This helps provide a bit more context for some of the snippets, although it's not perfect. (There's some repetition, and due to the constant provision of the readings in alphabetical order based on the author, sometimes readings that would flow much better placed together wind up being separated. For example, if a Vatican II document writes on a theme from Augustine, there could be a dozen other writings between them.)

After a fifty page history of these patristic readings, there's almost 100 pages of historical biographical information about the authors. It takes a while to get used to the alphabetization, though: people are arranged by their first names, which works with people like Augustine and Anselm, but it's a bit surprising to keep finding Robert Bellarmine in the "R"s. There are, sadly, a few typographical errors, including the repeated mistake of calling Augustine's lengthy sermon on pastors "Psalm 46" instead of "Sermon 46."

As an aside, I had hoped that this would be a reasonable replacement for the long out-of-print "Office of Readings," a separate volume published by ICEL years ago providing just these readings (which was a nice complement to the one-volume Christian Prayer, rather than needing the four-volume full set). There is an index of writers, but unfortunately, there is no day-by-day conversion chart, so one can't see what the reading is for any particular day. Also, while some snippets of these writings do appear in multiple places, there's no way to piece them back together. This is difficult to explain, but here's an example: one part of Basil's Rules, which would be read on the third Tuesday of Ordinary Time, can be found under the section on "Man's Capacity for God," and a different part appears under the section on "God Comes to Meet Man." If you wanted to read both pieces in context -- without going to the four-volume Liturgy of the Hours -- which one would you read first? Likewise, it's not at all easy to read something in the LotH and attempt to use this book to find related concepts. This book, of course, made no promises that it could do any of this.

Although this book tries to do a lot of things, it does most of them very well, and is a worthwhile introduction to the early church fathers.

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LT Haiku:

Writings of holy
men* reveal insights into
the Christian scripture.

* Women are also
included but that screws
up the syllables. ( )