The Office of Readings has a set of First Readings which over the course of two years cover all the New Testament and all the most important parts of the Old. They are described in detail in §§147 to 152 of the General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours.
The trouble with the two-year cycle is that it turned out to be too big to print. The books would have had to run to twice as many volumes as they do already – and they would have been too expensive for most people to buy.
So a one-year cycle was put together (in quite a hurry, the stories say). The one-year cycle is what is printed in all the books.
In an electronic medium, printing costs nothing and a 6-volume book is no bigger than a 3-volume on. So in Universalis we have both the two-year cycle and the one-year cycle.
This blog post tells you the whole story.
The Universalis website only has the one-year cycle.
The Universalis apps for iPhone/iPad and Android, and the Universalis programs for Mac and Windows, all give you a choice between the one-year cycle and the two-year cycle. They start with the one-year cycle because that is what people are familiar with from the books.
To change to the two-year cycle:
There is one limitation at present. We have only recorded enough audio to cover the one-year cycle, not the whole two-year cycle. If you are listening to the Office of Readings, and you have selected the two-year cycle, and today’s First Reading is not part of the one-year cycle, the Universalis app will temporarily switch you to the one-year cycle, so that you don’t have a silence instead of a First Reading. It will switch you back automatically when it has finished playing.
These pages have fewer features than the apps, and some pages (such as Spiritual Reading) are not available.
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