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Catholic Lectionary devotional is broken


jlm

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As I reported in another thread, the Catholic Lectionary module included with the Catholic Study Bible started showing the wrong readings as soon as I got it. The octave of Christmas was off by a day, but I thought the problems would end after the octave. They didn't. Then I thought they would end on January 13 when Ordinary Time began. Instead it showed me the readings for the previous week. OK, so I have to wait another week. Today there are no readings at all (see below). I'm now ready to give up. If I can still get my money back, that's what I want. The Catholic Study Bible is not otherwise of interest to me. I have plenty of other resources with the same information.

 

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Addenda:

  • To my recollection, January 1 is the only day on which the devotional showed the correct readings.
  • Besides fixing the reading selection process, the module could also be improved by indicating in the Sunday titles the lectionary year (A, B, or C). This would be useful for identifying Sundays in searches and in the Research tab.
  •  I would consider repurchasing the resource at some point in the future if it is fixed.
Edited by jlm
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jlm,

 

Thanks for your reports. I'm going to look into this. My guess is that it may be two separate issues. 1) The program's logic for liturgical calculations were based on a calendar other than the Roman Catholic one. And 2) because of that our internal coding of the module may off as well.

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OK, I'll be patient for a while more.

 

I think it's more issue 2 than issue 1. I'm not very familiar with the RCL, but looking at the table at Vanderbilt, the Sundays correspond this year: the Baptism of the Lord was January 12 in both calendars, the Second Sunday after Epiphany corresponds to the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, the Third Sunday after Epiphany to the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, and so on until Lent. Lent and Easter should all correspond. Trinity Sunday is the same. In many countries Corpus Christi is the Sunday after that for Catholics, but obviously not in the RCL. But generally after Pentecost, it looks like there's again correspondence between the RCL and the Catholic lectionary, in the sense that Proper N (N+5) is the N+5th Sunday in Ordinary Time, and even in the two weeks after Pentecost, this is relevant for determining the weekday readings.

 

To integrate readings assigned to specific dates, like December 27 or January 1, it's necessary to have these associated with a rank or priority, so that the code can determine which should prevail when that date is a Sunday or other celebration tied to the cycle of weeks. Beyond that there are some complications if you want to get everything right (which I don't expect): celebrations ranked as solemnities are automatically transferred if they cannot be celebrated on the appointed day; whether or not Epiphany, the Ascension, and Corpus Christi are transferred to Sunday depends on the nation (or part thereof); nations and other geographic circumscriptions have additional feast days.

 

For checking your results, you may find the 2019–2020 liturgical calendar (PDF) of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops helpful—or that for England and Wales. There's also a program written in C (romcal) that will generate the calendar for any year in a variety of formats. Its website also has a description of the rules for generating the calendar.

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  • 1 month later...

After a long dry spell (no readings at all), today I was offered the readings for Ash Wednesday:

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Maybe it will start working in Lent.

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I'm not sure if it will work during Lent properly. The issue with this module will require an update to Accordance to sync automatically for most dates. Until that happens, the date will have to be set manually.

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  • 3 weeks later...

So I'm not only giving bad news (today's two bug reports), I can say that the lectionary is still working, and had the right readings for March 19 as well.

Edited by jlm
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  • 2 months later...

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It stopped working on Pentecost, so I'm back to using my imported PDF calendar from the USCCB. It is actually a bit more convenient. I don't really want a devotional view of the readings, but the readings in the primary pane and the ability to open a commentary or other resource in the secondary pane.

 

With the User Tool, I copy the reference for one reading and then amplify the other. Then I go to the search field on the newly opened view, type a semicolon, and paste the reference I copied. Now I have a search view showing both readings together, and I can add a commentary or other resource.

 

It is hard to do the same with the devotional view because tapping a reference just scrolls the secondary pane to show the passage that was tapped. If there was a way to amplify the day's readings, it wuld be more useful to me.

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