Our Sources

Vigilemus

The shelf

Checked, not merely cited. Each of the 74 prayers, devotions and novenas is compared against a scan of the edition it names — not against whichever book happens to match best. 57 are all but identical to it and 14 match substantially. 3 score lower, and every text a number alone could not account for has been read by hand. The usual cause is the scan rather than the text: the 1889 Manual of Prayers sets the Nicene Creed in Latin and English parallel columns, and the scanner reads straight across them, so the two languages alternate line by line and no English phrase is left whole. That looks to a machine like missing text and is not. Where reading the page showed the wording genuinely differed, the citation was moved to the edition that matches: the 1910 Raccolta prints the Salve Regina as “in this vale of tears” against our “valley”, and gives the responsory of St. Anthony in Latin only. 2 texts are not on this shelf at all and are named below. Two limits worth stating plainly: this is a high similarity score against an OCR'd page scan, not proof of exact equality, and it does not cover the spiritual readings, which are cited to CCEL and New Advent — proofread transcriptions rather than scans.

Every text in Vigilemus comes from one of these books, and each links to the edition itself — a page scan for the prayer manuals, a proofread transcription for the patristic series — so any line in the app can be checked against the source it was taken from. Where a series runs to many volumes, the entry links the series and each text below carries its own volume and chapter.

Whole corpora

  • Holy Scripture — Douay-Rheims, Challoner RevisionProject Gutenberg #1581 — Transcribed by Dennis McCarthy and Tad Book. Every psalm and reading in the app resolves to this one text — the Little Office stores psalm NUMBERS only, so the psalmody cannot drift from Scripture. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1581
  • The Fathers on the day's Gospel — Catena AureaNewman's Oxford translation, 1841–45 — Matthew and Mark verified against CCEL's edition; CCEL hosts no Luke or John, so those two rest on the same transcription without a second witness. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/catena1.html
  • The Mass propers — the readings of the dayThe Roman Missal of 1962, or the modern Missal — Traditional propers, taken from the Divinum Officium project's calendar data; the readings themselves resolve to the bundled Douay-Rheims. Linked to the data repository because the site itself answers a plain request with a bot challenge. https://github.com/DivinumOfficium/divinum-officium
  • The Rosarythe manuals above, and one modern document named as such — The fifteen traditional mysteries and the manner of reciting the Rosary are printed in these public-domain manuals, and each of the Rosary's prayers carries its own citation. The LUMINOUS MYSTERIES and the assignment of mysteries to weekdays are not: they come from Rosarium Virginis Mariae (2002), and are named separately for that reason. https://archive.org/details/stalphonsuspraye00ligu
  • The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin MaryBenziger Brothers, 1915 — Checked string by string against the scan: 167 of 184 match at 80% or better, the shortfall being OCR damage and rubrics our data merges onto one line. https://archive.org/details/littleofficeofbl00newy

On no shelf, and why

These are not a backlog. Each one has been looked for, and there is a reason it cannot be shown to you in a pre-1929 printing. They are bundled anyway, deliberately, and this is the argument for doing so.

  • The Fatima Prayer (prayers)The decade prayer comes from the apparitions of 13 July 1917. The earliest Fátima literature is 1931 and the English editions are of the 1940s, so there is no pre-1929 printing to cite and there never will be — this is the one text on this page whose provenance cannot be closed by finding a better book. It is included because it is a short traditional formula in universal devotional use, prayed in this form throughout the Church and printed freely by everyone; and it is the only bundled text that is NOT claimed as public domain, carrying its own caveat wherever it appears in the app instead. Fátima apparitions, 13 July 1917; traditional decade prayer in universal devotional use — no datable pre-1929 English printing located (earliest Fátima literature is 1931+, English editions 1940s)
  • Oración de Fátima (Spanish prayers)The Spanish decade prayer, on exactly the same footing as the English one above: the apparitions are of 1917, no pre-1929 printing exists in any language, and none will be found. It is given in the form in which it is universally prayed in Spanish, and like the English text it is NOT claimed as public domain — it carries the same caveat instead. Apariciones de Fátima, 13 de julio de 1917; oración de las decenas en uso devocional universal — no se ha localizado ninguna impresión anterior a 1929 en ninguna lengua (la primera literatura fatimista es de 1931; las ediciones inglesas, de los años cuarenta). Se recoge en la forma castellana de uso común, por la misma razón que el texto inglés: no hay edición que citar y nunca la habrá.