Jacob Criostoir

The 1942 Divine Office Jacob Criostoir

Second only to the Holy Mass, in which the Most Blessed Eucharist is consecrated for God's Church, the Divine Office has been traditionally considered to be the most important and holy of spiritual practices. The Divine Office is based upon old Hebrew tradition of praying to God seven times per day. While this may seem similar to the Muslim practice of praying five times per day, our tradition dates back much further. The first recorded use of the Divine Office, as we Catholics would know it, was in roughly 80 AD, where the Roman historian Pliny the Younger noticed that Christians would set aside parts of the day to pray the Our Father and Psalms. By the third and fourth centuries, Church Fathers began to incorporate prayers and lessons into the traditional Hebrew prayer hours. These prayer hours are mentioned in the Gospels and in the book of Acts, but the Divine Offices creation can be attributed to the early monastic communities in both Europe and the Middle East.