Selecting Your Annual St. Joseph Guide for Prayer

 

The St. Joseph’s Christian Prayer guides are great and valuable resources; however with the various editions available it can be easy to accidentally select the wrong guide. Always read the title and item description carefully when selecting the guide. The publisher prints all the guides in the same black and white format with the same style of layout. Here is a brief explanation of the different guides to help you choose the right one to accompany  your book of prayer.

 

 

The booklet entitled The Saint Joseph Guide for the Liturgy of the Hours is for the full, four volume Liturgy of the Hours set. The guide is based on the calendar year, and tells you what readings are for which days of the year. However, be aware it is not a how-to guide for the Liturgy of the Hours, just a calendar guide. (Think of the guide in the back of your missal, that merely tells you where to find the Sunday reading for a particular date.) Therefore, it is intended for someone one who already knows how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours (also called the Divine Office) or who is being taught personally how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours by a friend or family member. If you are new to praying the Divine Office, you will want to also purchase an instructional guide such as Learning the New Breviary or The Divine Office for Dodos.

 

Large Print Liturgy of the Hours Guide

 

This guide is also meant for the four volume Liturgy of the Hours set. However, it is important to note that this is for the Large Print set. Due to the pagination and text size, the large print Liturgy of the Hours set pages do not match up with the standard set. What is on one page in the standard set will be on another page in the large print edition. For this reason, a separate guide is needed. Sometimes people may see the large print guide and decide they’d like to have a large print guide to pray the breviary with. However the large print Liturgy of the Hours guide book will work ONLY with the large print set.

 

The St. Joseph Guide to Christian Prayer can also be a source of confusion. The Liturgy of the Hours is sometimes informally referred to as Christian Prayer. However the Christian Prayer guide is designed for use with the one volume Book of Christian Prayer, an abridged version of Liturgy of the Hours which contains the major offices but not the Office of Readings. When shopping for your guide you will want to make sure you get this guide if you have the standard print book of Christian Prayer. This guide will not work with the four volume Liturgy of the Hours set, nor will the guide for the four volume set work with the single book as the page numbers will differ. 

There is also a Large Print Guide to Christian Prayer. As with the guide for the four volume set, the large print guide will only work with the large print book while the standard guide will work only with the standard book.

 

 

If you use the smaller sized Daytime Prayer book, you will need the corresponding Guide to Daytime Prayer. This guide is for the handy-sized book comprised of prayers for midmorning, midday, and mid-afternoon. Once again, page numbers in the guide are specific to this book so you cannot just grab any prayer guide and plan to utilize only the daytime prayer sections. The Guide to Daytime Prayer is the guide that will have the correct page numbers for you.

 

To view all the items in our Liturgy of the Hours category, please click here.