Solemn Compline is chanted every Sunday evening at 8pm at the Cathedral. This official prayer of the Church is sung in candlelight, as a way of closing the Lord's Day here at the Cathedral church of our Diocese. You have to experience it to understand how special it is--it last no more than 30 minutes.
Excerpt from Cardinal Raymond L. Burke's reflection on the Office of Compline
The Church, through the Liturgy of the Hours, an important part of her public prayer, sanctifies each hour of every day of our lives. She indeed makes all time holy. Among the Hours, the Office of Compline has a distinct importance. It is the Church's last prayer of the day, her prayer before retiring. It embraces the experience of the whole day which has passed and, at the same time, the experience of sleep, the abandonment of self to unconsciousness, which is, for us, a daily anticipation of death, of the passage from this life to the life which is to come.
Abbot Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., commenting on the Office of Compline for the Season of Advent, in what is now known as the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, observed:
This Office, which concludes the day, commences by a warning of the dangers of the night: then immediately follows the public confession of our sins, as a powerful means of propitiating the divine justice, and obtaining God's help, now that we are going to spend so many hours in the unconscious, and therefore dangerous, state of sleep, which is also such an image of death.
The Christian pilgrimage of each day, through the Office of Compline, is consistently placed within the context of the pilgrimage of a lifetime, which reaches its destiny in death, in the passage, with Christ, from our earthly home to the lasting home which He has prepared for us in Heaven.