Visual Liturgy subscribers can now access a revised and updated version of Saints on Earth: a biographical companion to Common Worship.
Many Visual Liturgy users will be aware of this 2004 volume by John H. Darch and Stuart K. Burns which contains version of the text that VL users could import as a “Help file†which displayed the relevant biography for all the saints’ days in the Calendar. A revised version of the text – reflecting the changes and additions to the Calendar approved in 2010 – is now available in a more flexible format to all Visual Liturgy users with an active subscription. This is available, as normal, by running the Online update within VL Live.
Once installed, the update can be used in several ways. The most obvious is that when you run Visual Liturgy, if it is a Saint’s Day, the name of the saint appears as a hyperlink on the Welcome screen.
Click the hyperlink to open the biography for that saint:
You can also find a full index to the biographies in the Visual Liturgy Help menu (note that VL must be restarted after the update before this will appear).
The biographies are also stored as texts in Visual Liturgy. You can find them under the Saints on Earth category in the list of service templates, presented month by month. This format is more convenient if you want to copy and paste or insert a biography into a service.
Finally, if you use the VL Agent, you will find a new SOE tab that shows the current biography when available.
