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Lectio Studies

Updates

Updates

What's changed on Lectio Studies — new texts, new features, fixes. Changes you'd actually notice, not a technical log.

August 21, 2026

  • A short welcome the first time you open My Studies. New members were landing on a list of study cards with nothing telling them how a week here actually goes. There is now a brief note at the top of the page the first time you visit: read the week's passage, post your reflection, join the live call, and go deeper if you'd like to. It is the same four steps the How It Works page has always described, moved to where someone new will actually see them. Dismiss it once and it stays dismissed.

August 20, 2026

  • One member opens the call each week. Cohort leaders can now put a member down for a short teach-back: three minutes, near the start of the call, on what struck them in that week's passage. It rotates, so over an eight-week study everyone has a turn, and the ask always arrives well ahead — the preparing is the point, and a surprise on the night is not. It is not a lecture and there is nothing to get right; if it isn't for you, "not this week" and "not this study" are one tap each and neither asks why. Nobody else is told you passed.

  • You can answer a reflection prompt twice. A prompt on the board stays closed until you have written your own answer — you see how many people have replied, never what they said, so what you write is yours. Once others have answered and the thread opens, there is now a second, optional step: having read them, would you add or change anything? Your first answer stays exactly as you wrote it, and the new one sits beside it. Nothing is marked right or wrong, nothing is scored, and skipping it is a perfectly good answer in itself. For now what you add is seen only by you and your cohort leader.

  • Eighteen new People pages — and with them, the last of them. Every author behind the Haydock Commentary, the Catena Aurea and the works the Catechism cites now has a page in the archive.

    • Saint Leo the Great — the pope whose Tome to Flavian helped shape Chalcedon's confession that Christ is one person in two natures
    • Saint Maximus the Confessor — tried, mutilated and exiled for holding that Christ has a human will as well as a divine one
    • Saint Nicetas of Remesiana — the Balkan bishop and missionary who wrote on the creed, Christian initiation, and the value of singing psalms
    • Saint Nicholas of Flüe — Brother Klaus, the Swiss farmer and father who became a hermit, and whose counsel is credited with holding the cantons together
    • Origen of Alexandria — the most prolific scholar of the early Church, whose importance and whose contested legacy the page states in the same breath
    • Saint Peter Chrysologus — the "golden-worded" bishop of Ravenna, whose short sermons are a window onto fifth-century preaching
    • Pseudo-Chrysostom — not a person but a label: the name scholarship gives to ancient works handed down under Saint John Chrysostom's, and the page says so plainly
    • Rabanus Maurus — the abbot of Fulda they called the teacher of Germany, who carried the Fathers into the Carolingian schools
    • Saint Remigius of Auxerre — the Carolingian schoolmaster whose classroom glosses shaped how the Gospels were taught for centuries
    • Richard Challoner — the bishop whose revision of the Douay-Rheims became the basis of most later English Catholic Bibles, Haydock's among them
    • Robert Witham — the Douai college president whose 1730 annotated New Testament Haydock reaches for again and again
    • Tertullian — the first major theologian to write in Latin, who gave the Western Church much of its vocabulary and is not honored as a saint
    • Saint Theophilus of Antioch — the second-century bishop whose To Autolycus holds one of the earliest Christian uses of Trinitarian language
    • Theophylact of Ohrid — the Byzantine archbishop whose clear, pastoral Gospel commentaries reached Aquinas in Latin translation
    • Saint Thomas Aquinas — the Angelic Doctor, and the compiler of the Catena Aurea itself
    • Thomas Worthington — the Douai priest who helped produce and annotate the Douay Old Testament
    • Thomas à Kempis — the copyist of Mount Saint Agnes, traditionally named as the author of The Imitation of Christ
    • Saint Thérèse of Lisieux — the Carmelite whose "little way" of spiritual childhood made a hidden life at Lisieux a teaching for the whole Church
  • Four new People pages:

    • Saint John of the Cross — the Spanish Carmelite poet who, imprisoned by opponents of his own reform, wrote the poems behind The Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night
    • Saint John Vianney — the Curé of Ars, a village priest whose long hours hearing confessions drew pilgrims from across France
    • Julian of Norwich — the English anchoress whose Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest substantial English book known to have been written by a woman
    • Saint Justin Martyr — the second-century philosopher who defended Christians to the imperial authorities, and left us the earliest full description of Sunday Eucharist

August 19, 2026

  • The week's reading is open when the page opens. On a study week page the passage used to arrive folded shut behind a little arrow, with the commentary below it already open — a reading product hiding the reading. The Scripture is now expanded from the start. The arrow is still there if you want the page short.
  • Weeks can now start with an introduction. A study author can write a short orientation for the week as a whole — what it is about, what to watch for — and it sits above the reading rather than after it. Weeks written before today don't have one and look exactly as they did.
  • Four new People pages:
    • Saint John Chrysostom — the golden-mouthed archbishop of Constantinople, whose homilies hold together the plain sense of the text and mercy toward Christ in the poor
    • Saint John Damascene — the monk of Saint Sabas who defended sacred images from the Incarnation itself, and gathered the Greek Fathers into one clear synthesis
    • Saint John Eudes — the French missionary priest who founded two congregations and spread devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary
    • Saint John Henry Newman — the Oxford convert and cardinal on conscience, the development of doctrine, and the ordinary path to holiness, named a Doctor of the Church in 2025

August 18, 2026

  • This Sunday's Readings — a new page, in the spot Psalm of the Week used to hold. It shows the day of the Church's year, the passages appointed for Mass that Sunday, and a place to think about them out loud with other members. The passages are shown in the Douay-Rheims, which is public domain; the wording you actually heard proclaimed is one tap away at USCCB.org.
  • The Psalm of the Week has moved into it, not away. The responsorial psalm is one of the Sunday readings, so it is still there every week — it just sits alongside the other three now. /psalm takes you to the new page.
  • Readings are currently published through the end of January. On a Sunday we have not published yet, the page says so plainly and points you to USCCB rather than guessing.
  • Four new People pages:
    • Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel — the French priest and philosopher, first secretary of the Academy of Sciences, whom Haydock cites on the harder passages
    • Saint Jerome — the translator of the Vulgate, whose conviction that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ still shapes how Catholics read the Bible
    • Saint Joan of Arc — the peasant girl who followed what she believed God asked of her, condemned at nineteen and canonized in 1920
    • Saint John Cassian — the monk who carried the wisdom of the Egyptian desert to the Latin West in his Institutes and Conferences

August 17, 2026

  • Four new People pages:
    • Saint Irenaeus of Lyons — the second-century bishop who answered the Gnostics from the Church's public faith, and whom Pope Francis named Doctor of Unity in 2022
    • Saint Isaac of Nineveh — the Syriac monk on repentance, tears and the inexhaustible mercy of God, added to the Roman Martyrology in 2024
    • Saint Isidore of Seville — archbishop, Doctor of the Church, and the encyclopedist whose Etymologies gathered the ancient world's learning for the Middle Ages
    • Jacques Tirin — the Antwerp Jesuit whose commentary Haydock reaches for on dates, places and parallel passages
  • Against Heresies now links to its author — the byline on Saint Irenaeus's Against Heresies takes you to his People page

August 16, 2026

  • Four new People pages:
    • Saint Hippolytus of Rome — the early Roman theologian whose surviving corpus may not all be by one hand, which the page says plainly
    • Hugh of Saint Victor — the Paris canon whose Didascalicon ordered all learning toward wisdom
    • Saint Ignatius of Antioch — the bishop who wrote seven letters on the road to his execution
    • Saint Ignatius of Loyola — founder of the Society of Jesus and author of the Spiritual Exercises

August 15, 2026

  • Four new People pages:
    • Pope Saint Gregory the Great
    • Guigo II the Carthusian — the Carthusian prior whose Ladder of Monks gave lectio divina its four rungs
    • Saint Hermas
    • Saint Hilary of Poitiers

August 12, 2026

  • Four new People pages:
    • Saint Gregory of Nazianzus
    • Saint Gregory of Nyssa
    • Giovanni Stefano Menochio
    • The Glossa Ordinaria — the standard medieval gloss, a school tradition rather than a single author
  • Invite a friend to your cohort — share a link that holds a seat for them. It shows the study, when the cohort meets, and who invited you, and it works for someone who doesn't have an account yet
  • Cohorts are adults-only for now — joining a cohort requires a birthdate on your profile, as messaging already did

August 11, 2026

  • Bernard, On the Love of God — 118 scripture citations linked
  • Four new People pages:
    • Fr. George Leo Haydock
    • Saint Francis de Sales
    • Saint Francis of Assisi
    • Saint Fulgentius of Ruspe
  • Author names on work pages now link to their People page

August 10, 2026

  • Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew — all 90 homilies, each linked to the passage it preaches on. Recovered ~20 missing pages the common digital copy has been passing around
  • Four new People pages:
    • Saint Epiphanius of Salamis
    • Euthymius Zigabenus
    • Evagrius Ponticus
    • Saint Faustus of Riez
  • People pages now open with a one-line description — Monk · bishop · heresiologist

August 9, 2026

  • The Epistle of Barnabas — Kirsopp Lake's 1912 translation, all 21 chapters, verse-numbered so cross-references land exactly
  • The Epistles of Alexander of Cappadocia — four letter fragments, c. 251
  • Eight new People pages:
    • Saint Cyprian of Carthage
    • Saint Cyril of Alexandria
    • Saint Cyril of Jerusalem
    • Saint Dominic
    • Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity
    • Saint Ephrem the Syrian
    • Didymus the Blind
    • Egeria
  • "Report a problem" on every page — tap the link, tap the thing that's wrong, send

August 8, 2026

  • Genesis in Reading view — real paragraphs under hand-chosen section headings. John is next
  • Your translation and view choice are remembered — across chapters and between visits
  • Tap a verse in Reading view for cross-references
  • CPDV tidied — stray "[ Genesis 4 ]" end-of-chapter markers removed

August 7, 2026

  • Fourth Bible translation: the Catholic Public Domain Version
  • Two spiritual classics:
    • Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life (1876 translation, 119 chapters)
    • Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Love of God (Patmore 1884, 11 chapters)
  • Haydock's commentary now lands on the right verses — Douay and King James verse numbering are now stored in step, so notes sit on the words they discuss
  • Four new People pages:
    • Saint Catherine of Siena
    • Saint Clement I of Rome
    • Clement of Alexandria
    • Cornelius a Lapide

August 6, 2026

  • Irenaeus, Against Heresies — all five books, 164 chapters, c. AD 180
  • Cross-references now say why they're there — each carries a sentence on what the citing work is doing with the passage, and which verses it covers
  • Unexplainable connections withheld — references that existed only because two texts were cited together elsewhere are no longer shown. Nothing deleted
  • Non-English titles now show an English nameAdversus haereses reads with Against Heresies beside it

August 5, 2026

  • Two more encyclicals of Leo XIIIImmortale Dei (1885) and Rerum Novarum (1891)
  • 2,092 Catechism references became links — each opens the right page on vatican.va. We link rather than reproduce because it's under copyright
  • The Confessions now explains its scripture connections — a short note on each, written by hand
  • Correction to the Catena Aurea — some quotations appeared under the wrong Father's name. Attributions rebuilt. If you read a Catena page before this date, a few speaker labels may have been wrong
  • Eight more People pages — Saint Barnabas the Apostle through Saint Caesarius of Arles

August 1, 2026

  • The Catechism of the Council of Trent — Buckley's 1852 English, all four Parts, 979 Questions
  • Works can now be read in more than one edition — a dropdown above the text. The Roman Catechism is first: Buckley's English alongside the 1566 Latin, which is still being transcribed

July 31, 2026

  • 971 liturgical connections — which Mass a passage was appointed for, and what was read alongside it. From the 1962 Roman Missal, not today's lectionary
  • The Council of Florence — the union bulls of 1439-1442, in Latin. No public-domain English translation appears to exist
  • A second Douay-Rheims edition, and a correction — the reader now offers the original 1582-1610 Douay, Challoner's revision, and the King James. What we had labelled "Challoner" was in fact the original
  • Three pages explaining how we workHow We Read Scripture, Our Stance on AI, and the Sacred Translation Standard
  • Cornelius à Lapide on Matthew — Mossman's English, all 28 chapters. Coverage is partial and always will be; the work page says which books exist
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