Why We Go to Mass and Pray the Office Every Morning

Our day begins in the chapel. First the Mass, then Matins and Lauds. After that the students pick up their bags and head to algebra, chemistry, history, and literature.

Parents sometimes ask why we spend that much of the morning in church when the academic day is already full. The honest answer is that we don't think of it as time taken away from the academic day. It's the part that makes sense of the rest.

The Church has always understood the Liturgy of the Hours as flowing out of the Mass and leading back to it. Praying the Office right after Communion sanctifies the hours ahead. Our students learn that from the order of events long before anyone explains it to them in a theology class. They receive Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and then, still in the same pew, they open their mouths and pray the psalms. The morning moves from receiving to speaking, and then, when the bell rings, to thinking.

Matins is where our students meet the greatest reading list ever assembled. The first lesson is always Scripture, taken in long course through the year, so that they hear whole books rather than fragments. The second is drawn from the Fathers, the Doctors, the councils, the martyrs, and the saints. Augustine, Ambrose, Basil, Gregory, Bernard, Leo, Aquinas, Newman. Outside the Bible itself, no body of writing has formed more scholars, and it is not close. These are the texts the universities were built to read. Our students hear them before eight-thirty in the morning, chanted aloud, in the same voice as prayer rather than as an assignment. A student who has sat through four years of Matins has been catechized by the best minds in the history of the Church, without ever having been handed a syllabus.

Our usual hymn at Lauds is Verbum Supernum Prodiens, which St. Thomas Aquinas wrote for morning prayer on the feast of Corpus Christi. It belongs at this hour. Its opening lines describe the eternal Word coming forth from the Father without ever leaving His side, and its final two stanzas are the O salutaris hostia, so our students already know by heart the hymn they will one day hear at Benediction. We also sing the proper hymns of the seasons, since Advent and Lent and Eastertide each have their own voice and our students ought to know it. But this is the one we come back to, week after week, until they own it.

What that hymn says is the foundation of everything we do in the classrooms. All things were made through the Word. The pattern of every created thing existed first in the mind of God. The world can be understood because it was thought before it was made.

So when a student finally sees why a proof has to come out the way it does, or why a molecule holds the shape it holds, or why Shakespeare put a particular word at the end of a line and no other word would have done, that student isn't doing something unrelated to what was prayed at eight in the morning. He is reading something that was already spoken. Every subject in this school studies the same Author.

This is also why we ask so much of our students academically. We're not running a devotional program with classes attached to it. St. Thomas taught that when the mind actually grasps a thing, it forms an interior word within itself, and that this interior word is the nearest created likeness we have to the eternal Word. Real understanding, as opposed to repeating back what was on the board, is already an imitation of the life of God. That is a serious claim, and if we believe it, we have no business assigning easy work.

The chapel shapes how our students speak, too. At the altar they watch the one case in the world of a word that does exactly what it says. Having seen that every morning, they are held to a higher standard in what they write, how they argue, and how they talk about a classmate in the hallway. A school that starts the day with the Word made flesh can't be careless about language.

Our teachers carry the weight of this. They name the connection out loud, briefly and often, half a minute at the start of a lesson, pointing out that the thing just understood is the same thing sung about that morning. The liturgy is not an addition to the education here. It is what holds the subjects together, and what lets us teach the truth whole.