I am old enough to remember having heard Franciscans of various allegiances chant the Divine Office in choir in Latin. It was impressive. The Franciscans of the Atonement at Graymoor were particularly marked by a love for the Divine Office inherited from their founders -- both converts from Anglicanism -- Father Paul James Francis Watson and Mother Lurana Mary Francis White.
The Conventual Franciscans (O.F..M., Conv.) had, in many places, a strong commitment to choral prayer and a somewhat higher standard of liturgical performance than that cultivated by the (O.F.M.) Friars Minor, although the latter are not entirely without a few strongholds of choral liturgical prayer in Italy and, of course, in the Holy Land.
The Capuchins, for their part, while reciting the Hours dutifully in choir, eschewed chant as a distraction and an impediment to recollection, and like so many movements of reform, invested more in the ways of mental prayer and a bracing asceticism than in choral liturgical prayer.
With the advent of the "peace and justice" enthusiasms of the 1970s, a serious commitment to choral liturgical prayer was judged, by many, incompatible with the "fundamental option for the poor" incumbent upon Franciscans in the post-conciliar age. Franciscans, Friars, Sisters, and even some Poor Clares, explored other non-liturgical or para-liturgical forms of prayer. Friaries and convents in which the complete cycle of the Hours was chanted in choir became extremely rare.
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The Holy Father's choice of Saint Francis of Assisi as a model of liturgical piety is a clarion call, invited all followers of the Poverello to examine their commitment to a full, liturgical life, including the choral celebration of all the Hours. Magnificent early Franciscan liturgical manuscripts, described by the famous Franciscan liturgiologist, Father Stephan J. P. Van Dijk, O.F.M., attest to the importance attached to the Sacred Liturgy by the sons and daughters of the Seraphic Patriarch. Perhaps now, after more than forty years of alienation from the sources of an authentically Franciscan liturgical spirituality, the children of the Little Poor Man of Assisi may be ready to embrace the vision of Pope Benedict XVI as a passage "from the world to God."
Read the entire piece on Vultus Christi.
