Working with the St Joseph Liturgy Of The Hours Guide 2022
The St Joseph Liturgy Of The Hours Guide 2022 is one of those reference documents that circulates through Catholic liturgical planning circles without much clear explanation of what it actually covers. I ran across it while preparing material for a small parish ministry last year, and it turned out to be more useful than the title suggests, but also more confusing than it needed to be if you don't already know how the Liturgy of the Hours works. Here is what it is and how to use it without losing half an afternoon.
What the St Joseph Liturgy Of The Hours Guide 2022 Actually Contains
It is a formatting and rubrical guide for those using the St Joseph version of the Liturgy of the Hours. The Divine Office has been published in several English editions over the years, and the St Joseph edition is a compact four-volume set that some parishes and religious communities prefer because of its portability. The 2022 guide updates certain rubrical notes, particularly around the 2022 liturgical calendar changes that the USCCB implemented for solemnities and feasts that shifted between years. The guide itself runs about forty pages. It covers office structure, when to substitute psalm tones, how to handle optional memorials during Lent, and the proper way to introduce readings when you are not following the full lectionary. It also includes a reference table for the principal hours: Office of Readings, Lauds, Midday Prayer, Vespers, and Compline. That is about it. One thing the guide does not do, which I initially assumed it would, is provide the actual texts of the offices. If you need the full psalms and readings, you still need the St Joseph volumes or a compatible digital edition like Universalis or Laudate. The guide is purely a rubrical companion.
How I Use It in Practice
I keep a printed copy on the lectern during communal recitation of Vespers. The guide is useful for quick reference when someone in the group is unsure whether a particular memorial is obligatory or optional on a given date. It took me about three weeks to figure out that the guide organizes its rubrical notes by season rather than by month, which made looking things up slower than it should have been. I started using the alphabetical index at the back instead and that cut my lookup time from roughly two minutes to about twenty seconds per question. The section on interchangeable psalm tones is the part I reach for most often. During Ordinary Time the guide lists five standard tones and explains which ones pair with which psalm types. I found that the recommended pairings work well for most groups, but there is one edge case that tripped me up. In late October 2022, the guide did not account for the overlap between the feast of Christ the King and a series of solemnities that fall in that same week. The recommended psalm responses in the guide assumed the ordinary seasonal tone, but the rubrics for Christ the King actually call for a different antiphon structure. I resolved it by checking the official Roman calendar supplement and switching to the votive antiphon for that Sunday. It was a fifteen-minute correction after we had already printed the bulletins, so I learned to double-check any feast that lands in the last two weeks of the liturgical year.
Get the Full Details
Where the Guide Falls Short
The 2022 edition has a notable gap in its treatment of the Hour of Midday Prayer. The guide mentions it exists and gives a brief structure, but it does not provide the full rubrical detail that it gives for Lauds and Vespers. If your community celebrates all five hours regularly, you will find yourself flipping between the St Joseph volumes and external sources for Midday Prayer specifics. This is a real limitation and not something minor. Several parishes I know have simply skipped Midday Prayer because the guide did not give them enough confidence to implement it properly. Another issue is the printing quality of the 2022 edition. The paper is thin and the ink bleeds slightly through on the dense rubrical tables. If you are annotating the guide with a pen, expect bleed-through. I switched to a fine-tip pencil for notes and that solved the problem, but it is worth knowing before you buy.
Download and Acquisition
The St Joseph Liturgy Of The Hours Guide 2022 is available through several Catholic publishers and book distributors. It is not always listed under its full title, so searching by the ISBN or by the authoring body associated with the St Joseph edition will help. The guide is typically sold separately from the main prayer volumes, which caught me off guard. You may need to order it as an additional item even if you already have the four-volume set. Some diocesan websites and liturgical resource hubs host a PDF version for parish use, though the quality of those scans varies. I have seen a few where the rubrical tables are too small to read comfortably on a phone screen. If you are downloading a digital copy, verify that the resolution is legible before committing to it as your primary reference.
Things Beginners Miss
The guide assumes a working knowledge of Latin terms used in the liturgy. Words like commemorate, occur, and impede appear in the rubrical notes without definitions. If you are new to the Divine Office, you will waste time looking up terms that the guide never explains. I recommend keeping a basic rubrical glossary open in another tab while you work through the first few months of using this guide. It saves roughly an hour of frustration per week until the terminology becomes familiar. Another point that is easy to overlook is the guide's treatment of the concluding hymn. It states that the hymn may be omitted on simple memorials but does not clearly explain what constitutes a simple memorial in the current calendar. The answer depends on whether your diocese has erected any local commemorations that elevate a saint's rank, and the guide does not address that variable. If you are in a diocese with unique local feasts, cross-reference the national calendar before assuming the guide's default rule applies to your situation. The guide is functional and accurate for the standard cases. It is not comprehensive, and it has blind spots, but for a parish that wants a reliable reference companion to the St Joseph volumes, it does the job. Just know what you are getting into before you start relying on it for everything.
