Liturgical year 2025-2026
For seculars reciting the monastic office
You can download the Latin liturgical ordo of the Abbey of Sainte-Madeleine here.
Latin Ordo
The Divine Office
Three miracles blossom unceasingly in the garden of the Bride of Christ: the wisdom of her teachers, the heroism of her saints and martyrs, the splendour of her Liturgy. Et hi tres unum sunt!
These three things are one, because the Liturgy is itself a song of wisdom and love: it sums up the two orders of intelligence and charity and makes them rise in prayer.
It is therefore not surprising that when the liturgical action, whether incantatory or sacramental, strikes our eyes and ears, we perceive in it the secret of our destiny and a sacred thrill seizes our whole being, as it did John the Baptist at the voice of Mary.
The voice of the Bride all at once delights the heart of the Bridegroom and sanctifies the souls of his children, thus fulfilling its dual function of worshiping God and sanctifying souls. Without doubt, this outpouring of love cannot be for each of us what it was for John the Baptist, the sign of his sudden and total transformation that made him the greatest among the sons of women; nevertheless, touched by the liturgical preaching, we sense a proclamation of salvation and a flavour of eternal life that transforms us little by little.
And if we happen to listen to these accents from another world resounding in a sacred language, inside one of those stone temples that the ancients erected with dignity, in deep accord with the spirit of prayer, we enter a mysterious world where gestures and words compose a divine harmony, like a faint echo of the hymns of the heavenly city, the only ones capable of distracting us a little from the things of earth.
"St Teresa of Avila used to say: "I am struck by the greatness of the Church's ceremonies. If we ask ourselves about the secret of this grandeur, we realise that it comes much less from the depth and breadth that our human industries give it than from the very essence of the Liturgy and its relationship with two very different orders of grandeur: the cosmic grandeur of our created universe and the supernatural grandeur of the Kingdom of Heaven.