The Liturgy of the Hours (also called the Divine Office) is the daily prayer of the whole Church, and every Catholic is invited to pray it. Priests and deacons promise at ordination to pray it each day for the Church and for the world, and religious brothers and sisters also take up the joyful task. 

Where It Comes From
It begins in Israel. Long before there was a breviary, there was a Temple, and in the Temple, the day was marked by sacrifice at morning and evening. The Psalms were that people’s prayer book, and they knew the hours by heart: “Seven times a day I praise you” (Ps 119:164); “Let my prayer be incense before you; my uplifted hands an evening sacrifice” (Ps 141:2). Daniel, in exile, knelt at his open window and prayed three times a day (Dan 6:10).

The apostles kept the habit and gave it a new center. Peter and John went up to the Temple “at the three o’clock hour of prayer” (Acts 3:1); Peter went to the roof to pray at midday (Acts 10:9); Paul and Silas, in chains at Philippi, were “praying and singing hymns to God” at midnight (Acts 16:25). By the fourth century, morning and evening prayer were public services in the churches, sung by bishops and people together, with lamps lit and incense rising at Psalm 141. The monks, who prayed more hours still, called it simply the Opus Dei—the Work of God—and Saint Benedict built his Rule around it.
Over the centuries the Office grew long and became largely the property of clergy and religious. The Second Vatican Council gave it back. “Pastors of souls should see to it that the chief hours, especially Vespers, are celebrated in common in church on Sundays and the more solemn feasts. And the laity, too, are encouraged to recite the divine office” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 100). What we are doing this fall is not an innovation. It is obedience to a sixty-year-old instruction, and to a practice three thousand years older than that.

What It Is
The Office makes the hours themselves holy. There is an Office of Readings (Matins), Morning Prayer (Lauds) at daybreak, prayer at midmorning (Terce), midday (Sext), and midafternoon (None), Evening Prayer (Vespers) as the light fails, and Night Prayer (Compline) before sleep. Lauds and Vespers are the two hinges—the “chief hours” the Council names.

Every hour has the same simple shape: an opening verse, a hymn, psalms with antiphons, a passage of Scripture, a short responsory, a Gospel canticle—Zechariah’s in the morning, Mary’s Magnificat in the evening, Simeon’s at night—intercessions, the Our Father, and a closing prayer. Prayers and readings change for feasts and seasons, but all of these are given by the Church—we never have to improvise!

At the center are the Psalms. Saint Augustine held that the whole of the Old Testament is summed up in them, as far as the spiritual life is concerned. David, who wrote most of them, is called a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22), and the reason is on every page: there is no human condition—grief, terror, gratitude, anger, exhaustion, joy—that the psalter has not already carried to God in words we are then given to borrow. You do not have to find the words. St. Athanasius called the Psalms the gymnasium of the interior life.

Why It Is Powerful
It is powerful because it is not finally our prayer, but Christ’s. The Council puts it as strongly as it can be put: the Divine Office “is truly the voice of the bride addressing her bridegroom; it is the very prayer which Christ himself, together with his body, addresses to the Father” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 84).

The saints wrote about the Office in terms that sound like exaggeration, until you consider who is doing the praying. “A hundred private prayers can never have the efficacy of a single petition presented in the Divine Office,” Saint Alphonsus Liguori wrote, “for this is offered in the name of the whole Church and in God’s own words.” Saint Bernardine of Siena said that in praying it we become “the mouthpiece of the whole Church.” Blessed Columba Marmion said: “The Divine Office surpasses every other prayer in value and efficacy.”

And it never stops. When you open Vespers here on a Wednesday in October, Lauds is beginning in Tokyo and Compline is ending in Rome. We join the prayers of the whole world and of all of heaven.