ORA — Prayer Warrior

A reverent Catholic prayer companion: daily Mass readings, the Liturgy of the Hours, the Holy Rosary, the saint of the day, and the liturgical calendar — with optional human-voice narration.

Built with Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, and TypeScript.

Features

• Today — liturgical season/colour, a daily verse, community prayer stats, and quick links.
• Daily Mass — the day's readings with a follow-along audio player.
• Liturgy of the Hours — the current hour's antiphon, read aloud.
• The Holy Rosary — guided or interactive, with per-bead artwork and hands-free narration that auto-advances the beads.
• Devotions — the Angelus, Divine Mercy chaplet, St. Michael prayer, Memorare, and more.
• Chaplet of the Holy Face — guided or interactive.
• Auxilium Christianorum — the daily prayers for spiritual protection, with each weekday's proper prayer.
• The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ — St. Alphonsus Liguori, as a narrated audiobook.
• Confession — how to prepare, plus a checkable examination of conscience.
• My Playlist — build a personal prayer sequence and pray through it in one session.
• Saints — the day's celebration with life and collect.
• Calendar — the month's feasts and seasons.
• Settings — pick a narration voice (with live previews), reading speed, night mode, and force-refresh the app.
• Installable PWA with an app icon; responsive (sidebar on desktop, bottom bar on phones).

Data sources

• Liturgical calendar — romcal (General Roman Calendar, US).
• Mass readings — the day's citations are read from the USCCB lectionary, then the scripture text is rendered from a chosen translation: ESV (if configured) → Douay–Rheims 1899 (public domain, bundled) → the scraped text as a last resort. Using only the citations plus a public-domain translation keeps the default fully license-clean.
• Narration — Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (natural voices) when configured, otherwise the browser's Web Speech API.

Configuration

All environment variables are optional — the app runs without them and degrades gracefully. See .env.example.

Variable	Purpose
ESV_API_KEY	Crossway ESV API key. Renders the protocanon in the ESV. Non-commercial free tier; a public app needs a Crossway licence.
GOOGLE_TTS_API_KEY	Google Cloud TTS key (enable "Cloud Text-to-Speech API"). Switches narration to a human voice.
GOOGLE_TTS_VOICE	Optional default voice, e.g. en-US-Neural2-D. Users can override it in Settings.

Copy .env.example to .env.local and fill in what you need.

Development

npm install
npm run dev        # http://localhost:3000
npm run build      # production build
npm run lint

Regenerating the bundled bible

The Douay–Rheims text in src/data/dra.json is generated from public-domain sources:

node scripts/build-dra.mjs

Licensing notes

• The bundled Douay–Rheims 1899 is public domain.
• The ESV is © Crossway and the NABRE (USCCB) is © CCD — both are used only when configured, with attribution shown in the readings source line. Confirm you hold the appropriate rights before deploying publicly.