Orthodoxy and Transubstantiation

[The Liturgist]

The Office of the Dead, for example, is part of the Liturgy of the Hours, which Catholic priests pray every day.

Not quite, the Office of the Dead is an invariant supplementary office similar to the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

By the way, one thing the Council of Trent, and Pope St. Pius X, and Vatican II, and even Annibale Bugnini, tried very hard to do was to reverse the status of the Divine Office / Liturgy of the Hours as a clerical devotion and to make it more widely celebrated in public in the churches, attended by the laity, which is how it historically was celebrated, but in the Middle Ages, a condition arose where increasingly, reading the Breviary became a devotion attended by Priests. It is of course celebrated publically among the Orthodox and Assyrians, and in some sui juris Eastern Catholic churches, but notably not among the Maronites, who renamed what in Syriac is called the Shimo (that still being the name in the Syriac Orthodox church) to the Fard, which is an Arabic word meaning “obligation” which signifies the priestly devotional aspect of it.

The Anglicans for their part succeeded in revitalizing the Divine Office for several centuries by adopting to their Protestant theology a plan for its reform proposed by Cardinal Quinones but rejected as too extreme, but recently the Anglican office has been endangered by the decline of the institution of the Boys Choir, so only parishes retain it, and BBC Choral Evensong, by broadcasting it over the radio, ironically did severe damage to its local celebration. However, they still celebrate more of the divine office than any other Western church on a parish and cathedral level than the Roman Catholic church.

See The Liturgy of the Hours In East and West by Fr. Robert Taft, SJ, which is quite a good book and makes for enjoyable reading, although there is a sense of tragic frustration as he describes the RCC’s repeated unsuccessful attempts to put Vespers and Matins back on the menu of the average parish church, and the tragedy wherein they were replaced by what were originally private devotions, like praying the Rosary, the Novena, and so on, which were turned into communal services.