Useful Sites

This page should be linked in every Daily Mass Reading post.

The disclaimer is- The readings on this site are not official, but are free from copyright.

I use many resources, although I have been typing out the Haydock New Testament, which is a unique translation of the Latin Vulgate. The Haydock NT matches the Haydock Commentary references better than the Rheims.

The people responsible for the sites listed below put a great deal of time and effort into making those sources available to you. Where you can find nearly everything I put up, even some of it in updated languages…..

SacredBible.org – I absolutely love this website and would not be able to do this site without making frequent use of the Douay-Rheims text so simply laid out which is a massive time saver. It contains the text of the Latin Vulgate in several revisions, along with a public domain transcription of the Douay-Rheims Challoner Bible and a completely new, public domain translation of the Latin Vulgate (Clementine) into current English. There is also a Latin-English study Bible with notes. This site gets top honors for these reasons.

Haydock Bible Commentary – This most excellent site is a transcription of the fantastic notes from the Haydock Bible. From what I can tell it is now complete. Edit – I have been copying from this website since Holy Week 2008 and will continue to do so.

Catechetics Online – This is an amazing resource for the student of Catholicism. Highly recommended. They have many patristic writings and the Catena Aurea and several other resources. You really need to use this site.

USCCB NAB Daily Readings website – United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Their work is copyrighted and I’m unable to post it, but I can link to the USCCB site where you can find the Mass Readings currently used in American Churches. (The links here remain up, but the USCCB apparently removes outdated pages after a while.) They make it simple with a nice graphical calendar that you can click on. It’s a very nice resource. Also. The New American Bible on this site has many footnotes, although not interspersed with the Daily Readings. Some people doubt the faithfulness of the notes in the NAB, but I like them and think they are useful for gaining an understanding of the text. They appear to be an attempt at including modern critical scholarship into the Bible. The Psalms used for the Liturgy are the older NAB. This will soon change to the Revised Grail Psalter, an updated version of the psalms that are currently used for Liturgy of the Hours/Christian Prayer. The Grail Psalter and Revised Grail are translated for poetic value and for that reason are easier to sing.

DRBO – Douay-Rheims Bible Online in paragraph format. I don’t use this site for readings because it has a copyright notice, but it’s good for reading the Douay-Rheims Bible online because of the format.

Universalis – This site is excellent. They have the Liturgy of the Hours and the Daily Readings from the Jerusalem Bible. Outstanding resource. Unfortunately the Jerusalem Bible, though easy to read and free from abuse (use is not necessarily abuse) of gender inclusion, is copyright restricted. Therefore I can’t use it. The Liturgy of the Hours posted on Universalis does not seem to include all of the responses, but it’s still very valuable for daily devotion…. and it’s free. If you want the official prayers you’ll probably have to pay for them, either by purchasing the Book of Christian Prayer or subscribing to eBreviary.com or some other source.

NEW Google Books – What Google has done here is amazing. They are cooperating with various libraries to scan as many books as they can as photo reproductions in PDF format and are using a high grade OCR software to change public domain books into text. It’s not a perfect process, but there are great many books from 1920 and earlier that are hard to find, but are in the public domain. Many of these books are Catholic. You can search the books from their website, or download the PDF. I have found several wonderful books, all free, that pertain to Catholic Tradition, traditional practices, and Catholic history and apologetics. In the sad state of the modern world, copyright law often gets in the way. These free sources are a blessing to everyone.