Magnificat

What Magnificat is

Magnificat is a monthly Catholic prayer and Mass-reading periodical, published as a pocket-sized paperback and mirrored in an iOS, Android, and web app. Each issue runs for a single liturgical month and is organized day by day, so you open today’s date and find that day’s morning prayer, Mass readings, meditation, evening prayer, and saint’s life in one continuous flow. It is published in the United States, France, several Spanish-speaking countries, and elsewhere, with each edition liturgically and linguistically localized.

The publisher, Magnificat, is a Catholic publishing house founded by Pierre-Marie Dumont in France in the early 1990s. The U.S. edition launched in 1998 and has grown into a household subscription for a wide slice of practicing Catholics — from daily Mass attendees to families who use it for grace before meals to commuters who pray morning prayer on the train. The app extends that same monthly volume to anyone who would rather not carry the paperback.

Why Catholic readers prefer Magnificat

The single biggest practical difference between Magnificat and a free Catholic app like Laudate is curation. Laudate is a Swiss-army knife of links — readings here, rosary there, a separate tab for the Liturgy of the Hours, another for the Catechism. Magnificat is the opposite: one editor has already chosen, sequenced, and laid out the day’s prayer for you. Open the issue, find today’s date, and the next hour of prayer is already decided.

That editorial sequencing is the thing longtime subscribers describe as transformative. It is the same logic that makes a missalette feel different from a parish bulletin — someone who knows the liturgical calendar has already done the work. For readers who have tried and abandoned the full Liturgy of the Hours because the ribbons and antiphons defeated them, the shortened Magnificat form is often what finally sticks. The art on the cover, the saint’s life on the facing page, the brief essay at the end of the issue — all of it is part of a single edited object rather than a feed.

The monthly liturgical companion: one volume, every day mapped out

Each Magnificat issue covers one calendar month and is structured around the liturgical year. Open today’s date and the spread is consistent: morning prayer first (a hymn, a psalm or two, a short scripture reading, the Benedictus, intercessions, and a closing prayer), then the day’s Mass readings in full — First Reading, Responsorial Psalm, Gospel Acclamation, Gospel — then a brief meditation written for that specific Gospel, then evening prayer (similar shape to morning, ending with the Magnificat canticle that gives the publication its name), then a one-page life of the day’s saint or commemoration. At the front and back of each issue sit a calendar, a sacred-art commentary on the cover image, a few essays, and a section of seasonal hymns with music.

The reason this matters is that it eliminates the assembly problem. Catholics who pray daily often end up juggling a Bible, a missalette or daily-readings app, a breviary or shortened breviary, a devotional, and a book of saints. Magnificat collapses that stack into one pocket-sized object. You do not have to plan tomorrow’s prayer; you only have to open tomorrow’s page. For people whose obstacle to daily prayer is decision fatigue more than time, that is the whole game.

Lectio Divina plus morning and evening prayer: a realistic daily office

The Lectio Divina pages take the day’s Gospel and walk the reader through the classic four-step structure: lectio (read the passage slowly), meditatio (sit with a word or phrase), oratio (respond in prayer), and contemplatio (rest in God’s presence). Each step is prompted in plain language so a first-time reader can follow without prior training. The meditation that follows the Mass readings is a short reflection, typically half a page, written by a working theologian, monastic, parish priest, or Catholic author — names like Fr. Donald Haggerty, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, Sr. Anne Flanagan, and many others rotate through.

The morning and evening prayer pages are a deliberate compression of the Liturgy of the Hours. They are not the full four-volume office, and Magnificat does not pretend they are. What they are is a single-page, ten-to-fifteen-minute version that follows the same basic shape — hymn, psalmody, scripture, gospel canticle, intercessions, closing prayer — set up so a reader can pray it without flipping ribbons or looking up antiphons. For readers who want the office but have repeatedly bounced off the complexity of the full breviary, this shortened form is the realistic on-ramp. Combined with the Lectio Divina pages, it gives most subscribers two anchor points in the day plus a structured way into the Gospel.

The print + app hybrid: same content, two surfaces

The Magnificat app is a faithful digital twin of the paperback rather than a reinvention. The layout mirrors the print edition page for page, so a reader who knows the paperback can find anything in the app immediately, and vice versa. The app adds practical things you cannot do on paper: search the issue, jump straight to today’s date, download the issue for offline use on a plane, and play audio versions of selected prayers and readings where available. The web reader works in any browser, which is useful for families who want to project morning prayer on a TV during Lent or read on a desktop while traveling.

The hybrid model is what most longtime subscribers actually settle into. The paperback lives on the kitchen table or the nightstand and gets used for morning prayer, grace before meals, and Sunday Mass. The app travels on the phone for the commute, the doctor’s waiting room, and the daily Mass on a workday. Because both surfaces are showing the same edited content for the same day, a household can move between them without losing the thread. This is the thing Magnificat does that no purely-digital prayer app can match — the print edition is a real artifact, with cover art and a binding and a sense of weight to the month, and the app is a convenience layer on top of it rather than a replacement.

Pricing

Where Magnificat falls behind

No full Bible. Magnificat gives you the Mass-reading pericopes for each day in full, but it is not a searchable Bible. If you want to compare translations, search by keyword, or read a whole book of scripture straight through, you need a separate app — the USCCB site for the NABRE, or a general Bible app, or a study Bible.

No full Liturgy of the Hours. The morning and evening prayer in Magnificat are a compressed daily form, not the complete four-volume office. Readers who want the full psalter cycle, the Office of Readings, Daytime Prayer, and Compline as the Church prays them will need iBreviary, Universalis, or the paperback Christian Prayer.

Limited audio (compared to Hallow). Magnificat does offer audio versions of selected prayers and readings, but it is not a full guided-audio experience with celebrity narration, sleep stories, and themed prayer series. If audio is the primary way you want to pray, Hallow is the more obvious tool.

The app is conservative. Navigation mostly mimics flipping pages, search is functional but not powerful, and there is no robust note-taking, highlighting, or sharing system. None of this is a dealbreaker for the core use case — daily prayer and Mass — but power users coming from YouVersion or Logos will notice the difference.

No free tier. This is the single most-cited complaint in app-store reviews. Magnificat’s answer is that the product is a curated monthly volume with paid contributors and printing costs behind it, and that the sample issue plus occasional trials let interested readers test it before buying.

Magnificat vs. Laudate vs. iMissal

These three are the apps most often compared by Catholic readers shopping for a daily prayer and Mass-reading companion, and they are genuinely different products that solve different problems.

Different strengths. Magnificat is the curated monthly companion — one editor, one volume, every day already laid out from morning prayer through saint of the day. Laudate is the free Swiss-army knife — dozens of separate features (readings, rosary, Stations of the Cross, Liturgy of the Hours links, Catechism, prayers) gathered behind one menu, no editing, no monthly arc. iMissal is the missal-focused option — a high-quality digital missal with the Mass readings, prayers, and ordo, plus podcasts and a rosary, structured around the Mass itself rather than around a daily office.

In practice, readers who want one beautifully edited thing they can open and trust each morning pick Magnificat. Readers who want a free starter kit and do not mind assembling their own daily rhythm from a feature menu pick Laudate. Readers whose primary need is the Mass — daily readings, the order of the Mass, prayers before and after Communion — and who want a focused missal app rather than a full daily office pick iMissal. Many practicing Catholics end up with two of the three on their phone: Magnificat for the morning, and either Laudate or iMissal for the specific extras Magnificat does not include.

Alternatives to Magnificat