In the new versions, you use the blue arrow next to the Introduction to an Hour to change between the “with Invitatory” and “without Invitatory” versions of the Introduction. Here is how things look when you start, with an Introduction that doesn’t include the Invitatory:

When you tap the blue arrow, the page changes to include the Invitatory:

You’ll see other blue arrows in other places in Universalis, and they always act to take you to alternative content. For instance, in the daytime Hours, you can switch between the “Psalms of the Hour” and the “Psalms of the Day”.

If you are having difficulty hitting the blue arrow and find yourself turning the page instead, download the latest version of Universalis from the App Store. Like all updates, it’s free. Versions older than 1.67 sometimes made the button hard to hit.

Feel free to follow or recommend the feed, but please don’t reply to it, because it’s an automated feed and there is no-one around to read the replies.

Solemnities appear like this: MARY, MOTHER OF GOD.

Feasts appear like this: SS. Simon and Jude, Apostles.

Memorials appear like this: St Charles Borromeo, Bishop (Friday of week 31).

Optional memorials appear like this: Monday of week 30 (St Antony Mary Claret, Bishop).

Ferias appear like this: Tuesday of week 30.

This is a bug in iTunes 10.5. It can be reproduced by manually adding an all-day event on the iPhone and then synchronizing: the event appears on the Mac one day later than it should.

We have reported this bug to Apple. We reproduced it for ourselves by setting both the iPhone and the Mac to Auckland time (GMT+13). My guess is that somewhere along the line Apple’s programmers assumed that no time zone was ever more than 12 hours away from GMT – but that is only a guess. It would certainly explain why no-one further west has reported the problem.

We have also established that the bug does not occur if one synchronizes through iCloud rather than through iTunes.

How to move the Universalis Automatic calendar to iCloud

If you haven’t yet turned iCloud on, this is quite easy: turning iCloud on will move all your calendars to iCloud.

If you have already turned iCloud on, you need to turn it off and then on again to get the Universalis Automatic calendar into iCloud:

1. In Settings, turn iCloud off. You will be asked whether you want to keep or delete the previously synced iCloud calendars. When we tried this, we chose “Keep” because it seemed safer.
2. In Settings, turn iCloud on again.

The Universalis Automatic calendar will now be in iCloud and all your iCloud devices will see it.

You only have to do this once. Once the Universalis Automatic calendar is in iCloud, it will stay there and Universalis will update it as necessary.

In addition, we now have a new Order of Mass page, which lets you view the Order of Mass online. You will also find Kindle and ePub versions of the Order of Mass e-book on that page.

It contains the new English translation of the Order of Mass, and various other improvements.

You will notice blue arrows on the right-hand side of some of the pages. These let you choose between various options. For instance:

• Optional memorials: which saint (if any) you want to celebrate.
• Invitatory psalm: which hour you want to precede with the Invitatory Psalm.
• Daytime psalms: whether you want to use the psalms of the day or the complementary psalms.
• Order of Mass: many options, such as the choice of Penitential Rite, Creed, and Eucharistic Prayer.

For the blind and partially sighted who are using a screen reader, blue arrows do not appear. Instead, all these options are selectable from the menu bar, in the new View menu.

The equivalent iPhone application will be updated soon: it has already been submitted to Apple. The Mac version of Universalis will be updated next week.

NOTE: As of Sunday 4 September, the downloadable program for Windows includes an option to create an e-book for the Order of Mass.

The final versions of Universalis for these systems are dated 8 August 2011. They will remain available for download in the future but no updates will be issued. For this reason we have made them into free downloads, for Palm OS and for Pocket PC / Windows Mobile. You don’t need to pay, and no registration codes are required.

If you have an old Palm or Windows Mobile device lying unused in a drawer, you might consider installing Universalis on it and donating it to someone who wants to have electronic access to the Liturgy of the Hours but can’t afford a new device.

The new iPhone version of Universalis will be available as a free update from the App Store as soon as Apple have approved it.

We are working on the new Windows and Mac versions and they will be available soon.

For the latest news about Palm and Windows Mobile, please see the next blog post.

1. Universalis is in English.
2. American-language texts such as the New American Bible are kept in American and not translated.

As for the spelling of English:

1. Universalis follows the house style shown below.
2. Text from external sources, such as the Grail psalms and the Jerusalem Bible, are spelt and punctuated in the same way as their sources, even when this is incorrect.

-ise and -ize

Historically, words coming from Greek, and to a lesser extent from Latin, have kept the ‘-ize’ form of the original. It is as wrong to write ‘baptise’ as it is to write ‘analyze’ and for the same reasons: it contradicts the original.

Words coming directly from French have kept the ‘-ise’ spelling of the French.

As for the spelling of the verb-forming suffix, this has always been ‘-ize’, as a check of any pre-war book (and many post-war ones) will show.

For more detail, see the Oxford English Dictionary (which goes for -ize always) or Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which makes more detailed distinctions. Partridge, like the OED, goes for -ize throughout, especially when new words are being coined from existing adjectives.

At some point in the 1960s, a strong American influence, coupled with widespread ignorance of the origins of words, began to change the spelling of English. People began to think that all words with -ize were American spellings, and accordingly started spelling them with -ise instead, leading to absurdities such as ‘baptise’ (already mentioned), ‘Medise’, and so on. Some dictionaries started to reflect this trend. Chambers’ does so, for instance, while the Oxford University Press holds to the older tradition.

What all this adds up to is this: if you see a word in Universalis that ends in -ize (and it is in our text, not copied from any of our sources), it is Greek, not American.

(If you’re interested in some relentless detail on the subject, read this blog post).

Because of its special importance, the Sunday celebration gives way only to solemnities or feasts of the Lord. The Sundays of the seasons of Advent, Lent, and Easter, however, take precedence over all solemnities and feasts of the Lord. Solemnities occurring on these Sundays are transferred to the following Monday except in the case of their occurrence on Passion Sunday (Palm Sunday) or on Easter Sunday.

You will find a number of web sites that move the Annunciation to 24 March instead. This is because the Norms were revised relatively recently, and the earlier version of the Norms moved the Annunciation to the previous Saturday instead of the following Monday. Many liturgical books date from before then, and many web sites, including some diocesan ones, reproduce the text of the Norms in their earlier version.

For those who want the Latin text (as included in the Third Edition edition of the Roman Missal, published in 2002), here it is:

Propter suum peculiare momentum, dominica suam cedit celebrationem solummodo sollemnitatibus necnon festis Domini; dominicae vero Adventus, Quadragesimae et Paschae super omnia festa Domini et super omnes sollemnitates praecedentiam habent. Sollemnitates autem in his dominicis occurrentes ad feriam secundam sequentem transferuntur, nisi agatur de occurrentia in Dominica in Palmis aut in Dominica Resurrectionis Domini.

The only exception to these rules is in the case of the Solemnity of St Joseph. The first edition of the Norms moves it to the day before; the second edition moves it to the day after except that if it is not a holy day of obligation, the bishops may move it anywhere outside Lent; the third edition moves it to the day after unless it falls on Palm Sunday itself, in which case it is moved to the day before, but if it is not a holy day of obligation, the bishops may move it anywhere outside Lent.