How to make a book like a cathedral: New Liturgy of the Hours
Word on Fire is publishing a version of the revised Second Edition of the Liturgy of the Hours, selected alongside Ascension Press by the USCCB. The article presents Word on Fire’s edition through commentary from members of its design team, describing it as an incarnational prayer experience for laypeople and consecrated persons, especially priests. Word on Fire is offering an early-bird discount through October 31; Ascension Press also has pre-order options, including a discount on the four-volume bundle.
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Word on Fire’s new edition of the Liturgy of the Hours is designed to make the Church’s daily prayer easier to follow and more immersive through revised page layouts, generous margins, carefully chosen materials and historic artwork. The edition is part of a broader revision of the breviary approved by U.S. bishops and confirmed by the Holy See; Word on Fire says it will also provide a full set to every seminarian in the United States, beginning in January 2027. 1
The U.S. bishops selected Ascension Press and Word on Fire in October 2025 to publish versions of the Liturgy of the Hours, Second Edition. The USCCB’s revision process began with a bishops’ vote in November 2012, concluded its approval process in November 2024, and sent the completed manuscript to the Holy See on May 29, 2025, for confirmation. 1
Word on Fire presents its edition as a way to encourage wider participation in the prayer tradition. Bishop Robert Barron said the project aims to draw the Liturgy of the Hours further into Catholic families, schools, parishes and communities. 1
The article traces the practice to early Christians gathering to pray at set times, continuing the Jewish tradition of praying the Psalms through the day. St. Benedict incorporated the practice into monastic life in the sixth century, and the growing collection of prayers, hymns and readings eventually required multiple books. 1
The breviary consolidated the texts and structure, including for priests outside monastic communities. After the Council of Trent, the Roman Breviary was promulgated in 1568; later reforms included changes under Pope Pius X and a new Psalm translation under Pope Pius XII, implemented by Pope John XXIII in 1960. Following the Second Vatican Council’s call for the Divine Office to be the prayer of the whole Church, the revised Liturgy of the Hours was published in 1975. 1
Word on Fire’s design team said it considered how smartphones and prayer apps have made the Liturgy of the Hours more accessible, while seeking to create a physical book dedicated to prayer. The team compared the desired page experience to an orderly desk: rubrics are moved to sidebars, the text is given more space, and the typeface was selected with readability in mind. 1
Creative Director Nicholas Fredrickson said the existing volumes place text close to the page edges and binding, making it harder to read near the gutter. The new layout adds margins and reorganizes the content to emphasize the prayers; Fredrickson described the design approach as “cathedralic,” with individual choices intended to serve deeper communion with God. 1
The production draws on specialist partners: paper producers in France, a leather tannery using material from Spain and Portugal, and Italian printers who also bind the books and gilt their page edges. The edition includes dozens of illustrations by 19th-century French artist Gustave Doré, whose work Word on Fire has also incorporated into its Bible. 1
Word on Fire’s edition was offering an early-bird discount of $140, plus free shipping, through October 31, 2026. Ascension Press also had preorders available, with a 5% saving for customers purchasing the complete four-volume bundle. 1
Word on Fire Executive Director of Publishing Brandon Vogt said a donor initially funded free sets for 4,000 seminarians, then increased the commitment to cover 5,300 after seminarian numbers rose. Every U.S. seminarian is to receive the complete four-volume set, with distribution beginning with the first volume in January 2027. 1
Liturgical books mediate communal prayer and ecclesial identity
Yes. Liturgical books mediate communal prayer by giving a gathered Church shared words, readings, gestures, and patterns of celebration. They also carry ecclesial identity: through them, a community prays with a faith and memory received from the wider Church and from generations before it. But the books are not the liturgy itself; they serve the Church’s act of worship, in which Christ and the community are joined.
A liturgical book gives the assembly a common form of prayer. Rather than each person inventing a private service, the community hears and speaks within a pattern that unites its members across differences in age, experience, and personal expression. The liturgy is therefore not simply something individuals do side by side: it is an action of the Church, and the gathered assembly manifests the Church at worship.
This shared form also expresses the Church’s ordered life. Liturgical books contain both the texts of worship and, in many traditions, norms regulating how they are used. They guide the roles of celebrants, ministers, readers, and choir, while the assembly participates in the common celebration. The books thus do not erase differences of ministry; they help those different services belong to one act of worship.
Liturgical books are also carriers of Christian memory. The prayers and readings place a community within the story of God’s saving action, rather than leaving it to construct its faith from present preferences alone. A recent doctrinal text describes liturgy as a form of living memory through which believers receive a faith prayed and lived by others before them. It also emphasizes that liturgical participation shapes people from within, not merely by informing them about religious ideas.
“Therefore, to celebrate means first and foremost to receive a faith that has been believed, lived, and prayed by others before us.”
That reception is communal: the believer enters a “we” that precedes and surpasses any one person. In this way, a liturgical book helps connect the local congregation with the Church’s broader and longer life. The Ukrainian Catholic catechism, for example, describes its tradition’s liturgical books as containing a rich treasury of Christian tradition and accompanying both the community and individual Christians in spiritual growth and knowledge of God.
The mediation is not merely literary. Liturgy communicates through words, but also through silence, gesture, symbols, sound, and the coordinated action of the assembly. Its books help give those elements a coherent form; the actual celebration is where the community participates in the mystery being celebrated. The doctrinal text accordingly warns against reducing liturgy to a “ritual framework” and presents it instead as a privileged place where Christ’s saving mystery is celebrated and communicated.
This is why the books’ purpose is not simply to preserve wording on a page. They serve prayer that is embodied, communal, and ecclesial. Scholarship on liturgy likewise stresses that ritual is expressed through language broadly understood—including gestures and symbols—and is shaped in relation to people’s cultural life.
Because liturgical books shape common worship, changing them can affect more than style: it can alter how a community remembers, prays, and understands its place in the Church. At the same time, faithful transmission is not the same as making worship unintelligible or inaccessible. The recent doctrinal text describes the task as holding together fidelity to the Church’s symbolic tradition and making the message accessible and meaningful in the present.
So the claim that liturgical books mediate communal prayer and ecclesial identity is strongest when “mediate” is understood carefully: the books are neither disposable scripts nor objects that act independently of the Church. They are authoritative instruments of a living tradition, serving the worship of an assembly whose common prayer forms and expresses its identity as Church.