lectionary — Traditional Lectionary CLI

The traditional Roman Lectionary in your terminal. Epistle and Gospel readings for any day in the 1962 liturgical calendar, with the full Douay-Rheims text.

What It Does

lectionary looks up the proper Epistle and Gospel readings assigned to any day in the 1962 Roman calendar and displays the full text from the Douay-Rheims Bible. It handles Sundays, ferias, feast days, vigils, and ember days — automatically resolving which readings apply based on the liturgical calendar.

Useful for preparing to assist at Mass, for spiritual reading, or for following the Church's one-year cycle of Scripture. Everything runs locally and offline.

Example

$ lectionary

  Monday in the First Week of Lent
  March 3, 2026

  Epistle: IV Kings 5:1-15
  ────────────────────────
  Naaman, general of the army of the king of Syria,
  was a great man with his master, and honourable:
  for by him the Lord gave deliverance to Syria: and
  he was a valiant man and rich, but a leper ...

  Gospel: Luke 4:23-30
  ─────────────────────
  At that time: Jesus said to the Pharisees:
  Doubtless you will say to Me this similitude:
  Physician, heal thyself: as great things as we
  have heard done in Capharnaum, do also here in
  Thy own country ...

Installation

brew install ecclesia-dev/tap/lectionary   # coming soon

Homebrew tap not yet published. In the meantime, build from source — see the GitHub repository.

Usage

lectionary                     # today's readings
lectionary --date 2026-12-25   # readings for a specific date
lectionary --epistle           # Epistle only
lectionary --gospel            # Gospel only
lectionary --sunday-next       # next Sunday's readings
lectionary --week              # this week's readings

Source

Free and open source. github.com/ecclesia-dev/lectionary