The Name
“What? Could you not watch one hour with me? Watch ye, and pray that ye enter not into temptation.” Matthew 26:40–41, Douay-Rheims
Vigilemus is Latin for “let us keep watch.” In Gethsemane, on the night before He suffered, Our Lord asked His disciples to watch and pray — vigilate et orate. Down the centuries the Church has kept that watch, praying through the hours of the day: Matins before dawn, Lauds at daybreak, the little hours through the working day, Vespers at evening, Compline before sleep.
Vigilemus is that answer in one word — the same “let us” the Church uses whenever the priest says Oremus, “let us pray.” Not a command, but an invitation: let us keep watch together.
What Is Inside
Today
The readings of the day in the Douay-Rheims, the traditional English Bible of the English-speaking Church, with the Church Fathers’ commentary on the day’s Gospel from the Catena Aurea. Choose the Roman Missal of 1962 and its one-year cycle, or the modern Missal and its three-year Sunday cycle — the calendar follows whichever you pick.
The Hours
The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary — Matins through Compline, season-aware — read it, or listen: every hour narrated, part by part.
Prayers
The common prayers of the Church, complete with their rubrics — when to bow, when to genuflect, when to strike the breast.
Novenas
A novena is nine days of prayer leading up to a feast. Vigilemus schedules each one so it ends on the right day, with litanies and seasonal devotions.
The Rosary
All twenty mysteries. The day’s set is announced and prayed aloud as you would pray it — the mystery named, then the decade, down to the Fatima Prayer.
Library
The whole Douay-Rheims Bible, the full Catena Aurea, spiritual readings, and search across everything.
Scripture, linked
Citations are tappable wherever they appear — from a prayer, a psalm, or a Father’s homily straight to the sacred page.
The App
Our Sources
Every text comes from the Church’s own historic prayer books, breviaries, and translations — each in the public domain or in free devotional use, and each one named. Scripture and the prayers, word for word.
Building on public-domain texts is a deliberate choice: it lets the whole of this reach you without licensing standing in the way, and it means every word can be traced to a named, historic source you can check for yourself.
- Holy Scripture — Douay-Rheims Bible, Challoner Revision — Project Gutenberg #1581
- The Mass propers — the readings of the day — the Roman Missal of 1962, via DivinumOfficium; the modern order of readings, compiled by Fr. Felix Just, S.J.
- The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary — Benziger, 1915
- The Fathers on the Gospels — St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea — Newman’s Oxford translation, 1841–45
- The spiritual readings — the Fathers themselves, in Schaff’s Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (15 of the 17), the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and the Oxford Library of the Fathers
- The Rosary — the mysteries and the manner of praying it from the same public-domain manuals; the Luminous Mysteries and the weekday scheme come from Rosarium Virginis Mariae (2002), which is not public domain and is named here for that reason
- Common prayers & novenas — the Raccolta (1910), pre-1929 prayer manuals, and other named public-domain sources. Two carry a narrower claim: the St. Jude novena is a 1929 printing, public domain in the United States only; the Fatima prayer (1917) is in universal devotional use, with no pre-1929 English printing located.
Privacy
Every text and every recording in Vigilemus lives on your device. The app makes no network requests of its own — not even for the narration — so it works entirely offline; the only time anything leaves your phone is if you tap a source link, which opens your browser. No account, no analytics, no advertising, nothing collected in the app — your prayer life is between you and God. This website counts page views; the app cannot.