Divinum Officum Now Available with German Translation

I am certain that many of our readers are aware of and use the site Divinum Officium, one of the most useful liturgical resources on the web. It provides the full text of each day’s Mass and Office in the Extraordinary Form, with the full Latin text on one side of the page, and a vernacular translation on the other. The Masses appear in full with everything in order, so you don’t have to click links back and forth between the invariable, semivariable and variable parts. The Office is likewise arranged hour by hour, and the reader can choose which set of rubrics to follow (the original 1570 Breviary of St Pius V, the same breviary as it was in 1910, the Breviary of St Pius X, etc.)

Hitherto, the site has provided the side-by-side translations in English, Italian, Hungarian and Polish; I have just received word that, as of the First Sunday of Advent, German has been added to that list; information about the source of the German texts is available here. These translations will be a tremendous help to German-speaking priests and laity who may want to pray the EF Office, but who need some help with the Latin. The creators and administrators of the site have clearly put a tremendous amount of time and effort into the site, which must involve some rather complicated programming to account for all the different possible options, especially in the Office. They are very much to be commended for making such a valuable site available to all for free!

(This is a slightly cropped screen capture from Divinum Office, showing the beginning of Vespers for today, December 2nd, in Latin and German, according to the Roman Breviary as it was in 1910. First Vespers of St Francis Xavier; click to enlarge)