How to send a Contact Us message

All the Universalis apps and programs now have a command called “Contact Us”. This is a good way of getting in touch with us, because it creates an email which automatically contains a lot of useful information – such as which version you are using, what calendar and language settings you have, and what page you are looking at.

Updating apps and programs

Depending what Universalis app or program you are using, it may update itself automatically when a new version comes out. Here are all the details, with instructions for manual updating.

May 2023 newsletter

Happy Eastertide!

The air all around is full of Alleluias, and in the Android and iPhone/iPad apps you even have an Alleluia button which, if you press it, plays you the word ‘Alleluia’ spoken by users of Universalis across the world.

The carpenter and the crown

On Saturday 6 May the people of the United Kingdom will be having a new servant anointed for them: a King. The location is the abbey church of St Peter in Westminster. The name reminds us that it is at the basilica of St Peter in Rome that the servant of the whole people of Christ is anointed: the Pope.

What makes this coincidence fruitful is that on Monday 1 May we celebrate the memorial of St Joseph the Worker. These dates taken together give a clearer perspective on the nature of work and of service.

March 2023 newsletter

Happy Lent!

We are getting up to the middle of Lent now, so it seems a good time to be recommending some sources of spiritual nutrition to keep the momentum going. There are three in this newsletter: the Creed in Slow Motion videos, the longer passages in the Readings at Mass page, and the Spiritual Readings page in the apps and programs.

The Creed in Slow Motion

Father Sean Doggett in Grenada has recorded a series of videos which follow the themes of The Creed in Slow Motion. The videos are quite short, so it is not a burden to watch them, and they are presented with great charm and simplicity. Apart from their value in themselves you could find it useful to watch them with young people and use them as a starting-point for conversation. There are 53 videos, and you can either watch them one a day by following the link in our About Today page – about a thousand people a day are doing this – or look up the complete list here.

Longer passages

The First and Second Readings at Mass are decently short. They have to be, because anything else would unbalance an occasion which is centred not on scripture but on the encounter with the Lord in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist.

On the other hand, if you are looking at the readings at home then you are studying, not participating in a sacrament, and the wider picture can be useful and interesting.

For instance, next Sunday is the watery Sunday of Lent: as the Gospel gives us the magnificent dialogue with the Samaritan Woman about water welling up to eternal life, so the first two readings quickly give us Moses striking water from the rock and St Paul talking about the Love of God being poured into our hearts.

But those readings are just highlights, because the whole passage from Exodus tells us where and why the Israelites were tormented by thirst, and what happened next, and the whole passage from Romans gives a rounded picture of our justification through Christ.

In the Universalis apps and programs, you can choose to see these longer passages. They are added to the very end of the Readings at Mass page, so you will still see the normal Mass readings in the normal place and won’t be distracted.

The “Show longer passages” option is in the Settings screen of the mobile apps, in Tools > Options in Windows, and in Universalis > Preferences > Translations on the Mac. Universalis won’t give you those longer passages on every single day (it is “borrowing” them from the scriptural readings in the Office of Readings) but you will see them more often than not, and they are well worth a try.

Spiritual Reading

The Office of Readings is often thought of as being something for specialists. Perhaps it is the slightly obscure name it has been given, or perhaps it is its length – it does sometimes seem to have the most tedious historical psalms! But the Second Readings in the Office of Readings are one of the glories of the Liturgy of the Hours (they are what first drew me into it) and it is a pity to miss them.

The Spiritual Reading page in Universalis gives you just the Second Readings and nothing else. Have a look at it when you have a moment. Sometimes there is only one Second Reading, so that for instance this Sunday it is (fittingly) St Augustine’s commentary on the gospel of the Samaritan Woman. But quite often there are more. On Wednesday we had not only Wednesday’s reading but also the reading for St John of God (a humbling one, that), and even one for St Felix, whom you may not have heard of otherwise because he is celebrated only in East Anglia. In a sense the Spiritual Reading page is richer than the proper Office of Readings because it gives you the chance to see all these readings wherever you are.

“Spiritual Reading” comes in the same Hours menu as the Readings at Mass and all the Hours. Give it a go.

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Thank you all for using Universalis. If you have trouble or questions, or suggestions, do write to us at universalis@universalis.com or use the Contact Us button in one of the apps.

Let us all keep one another in our prayers, as always.

February 2023 newsletter

How long is Christmas?

When you go into a church on the first day of February and see a crib still there long after we have all got rid of our trees, the question presents itself in concrete form.

Christmas is Christmas Day – of course.

Christmas is the Twelve Days of Christmas, from the birth of Jesus and his appearing to the shepherds up to the Epiphany, the coming of the Wise Men and the first appearance of the incarnate God to the Gentiles.

Christmas is more than that. The celebration of the Incarnation is not complete until Jesus is sent out on his mission on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord.

Christmas and the Epiphany and the Baptism are three facets of the same event, and it resonates throughout the liturgy of the period. But there is more to come.

Before Christmas there is a seven-day countdown, marked by the ancient ‘O Antiphons’ – and that is part of the bigger almost-four-week warm-up which starts on Advent Sunday. Cribs often start then. I remember seeing one in Hildesheim in Germany which was 20 feet long and told the whole story of salvation history, beginning with a Garden of Eden with giraffes in it.

After the triple Christmas-Epiphany-Baptism celebration, it still isn’t all over. The afterglow of Christmas still carries on. The Marian anthem at Compline is the Alma redemptoris mater, and the Crib is still to be seen in churches. This is because Jewish tradition does not bring the season of “a child has been born” to a close until forty days have passed. Forty days bring us to today, so today is final, definitive closure of the Christmas season as a whole: the feast of the Presentation in the Temple, with all its candles.

And that is that. Now we are back to normal. Or rather, we aren’t, because nothing is normal. The entire ten-week celebration has taken us once again through the transition from BC to AD, and it reminds us that we are in a ‘new normal’ which is not normal at all, because the Child has been born.

God is with us, and can never not be.

Scrolling and page-turning

Everyone everywhere always agrees that between scrolling (like a web page) or page-turning (like a book) there is one and only one proper way of reading a substantial amount of text. The opposite way is just useless.

As for which of these two ways is the right way, opinions differ.

The Universalis apps on iPhone/iPad and Android let you do both. This post is to remind you of that fact and tell you how to set up the proper way of reading text.

The Epiphany again

Some people get into a terrible flap after the Epiphany, and six years out of seven they write to us to say that we have got the readings wrong. So this post really ought to appear every year.

In religious parts of the world the Epiphany is celebrated when it always has been: on the 6th of January, when good children get presents from the Kings. In more commercial parts of the world the Epiphany is moved to the Sunday after New Year’s Day, so that the Twelve Days of Christmas become the Eight Days or the Fourteen Days.

The reason for all the panic is that a day such as Saturday 7 January 2023 has different readings depending on where you are. In religious countries (including England and Wales) it is 7 January, the first day after the Epiphany. In commercial countries (including Scotland and the USA) it is the day before Epiphany Sunday, normally labelled “7 January (before Epiphany)” in the books. Everything gets back into step on Tuesday 10 January 2023, which is Tuesday of week 1 in Ordinary Time.

December 2022 newsletter

Happy Advent!

At this time of year the Church’s calendar has what looks like a fit of unimaginativeness. All the rest of the year, days are marked as “Monday of the 21st week in Ordinary Time” and so on. Now, as we get near Christmas, the calendar solemnly informs us that December 17 is “17 December”, December 19 is “19 December”, and so on all the way to Christmas Eve. We feel a little cheated: we think we could have guessed that for ourselves.

Of course the designers of the calendar do nothing without a good reason, and even their accidents are not really accidents. You can see what they have been doing if you look up into the sky. Planets, when they get near the Sun, disappear, swallowed up in its glare; and in the same way Christmas swallows up the weekdays near it. What does the Wednesdayness of a Wednesday matter if it is four days before the celebration of the coming of our Saviour?

Giving Universalis for Christmas

The easiest way to give Universalis is in the form of a Universalis registration code. A registration code really is a gift for life.

A Universalis registration code costs £19.99, which at today’s exchange rates is $24.54 or €23.30. It gives the recipient all the Mass readings for every day, forever, and all the Hours of the Liturgy of the Hours for every day, forever. There are also benefits such as the daily ‘About Today’ pages, with their stories of the saints and their illustrations. The registration code works on whatever devices your friend has – Android and iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch and Mac and Windows – and also for making personal e-books.

How to get the latest Android version

Some of you have been waiting for version 2.159 of the Universalis app for Android from Google Play. This is now in the Play Store.

Automatic update

The Play Store automatically updates most people’s devices, so you may find that it has already updated yours without you having to do anything.

Getting the update by hand

Here are Google’s instructions for getting the latest update directly, without having to wait for the Play Store to send it to you.

The Kindle e-book service

If you have a registration code, we give you the ability to create a Kindle e-book using either your computer or our web site. If you use your computer, you can install the e-book on your Kindle yourself. If you use our web site, you can send that e-book through Amazon’s Personal Documents Service and have it installed wirelessly on your Kindle.

Until now, the website route has transmitted your e-book to Amazon directly. At 06:30 UTC on 1 November 2022, Amazon reprogrammed their systems to block this route. They now reject any e-books we send them on your behalf.

We have accordingly changed the way our web site works. It now sends the e-book to you, and you forward the e-book to Amazon yourself.

This blog post is simply here to explain why the procedure has changed. There is nothing that you need to do, except read the instructions carefully next time you create an e-book.

If you requested an e-book after Amazon’s embargo at 0630 on the 1st and it was rejected by Amazon, we have already re-requested the e-book for you and it has been sent to you, for you to forward to Amazon.

November 2022 newsletter

As October is the month of the Rosary, so November is the month of the dead. Outside, the trees finish making next year’s buds and drop their leaves and take on the appearance of death. In the Church’s calendar the year comes to an end and so does the world itself, with readings dominated by the Apocalypse and the prophecies of Daniel.

At this season the Church bids us remember the dead. The day after All Saints we pray for the souls of all the departed, followed a week or so later (in many parts of the world) by those who gave our lives for us in war.