Category: Prayer

3 min read

Prayer

What Is A Chaplet?

Father Francis Hoffman

February 25, 2019 3:47 pm February 25, 2019

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3 min read

A chaplet is a personal devotional prayer that can be prayed privately or in a group, out loud or silently, in a church or in an ordinary setting. It could…

A chaplet is a personal devotional prayer that can be prayed privately or in a group, out loud or silently, in a church or in an ordinary setting. It could be prayed on a plane, in a train, on a bike or a hike. It could even be sung with or without musical accompaniment, in Latin, Greek or in the vernacular. There are different types of chaplets, and the two most common are the Rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet. Typically, prayer beads (rosaries, chaplet bracelets) of different forms (wood, glass, metal, cloth, rope, nylon, even sea shells!) are used by the faithful to keep track of where they are in the prayer. Often these sacramental items are blessed and people carry them in their pocket or hang them off the rearview mirror over the dashboard in their car.

Rosaries and chaplet bracelets — if they are blessed — should be treated with care, even if they are not technically considered sacred. Sometimes people kiss their beads when they pull them out or put them back in their pocket, purse or pouch. Some rosaries even become galleries of saints over time as their owners attach medals of their favorite saints between each decade.

Children tend to be very fond of rosary beads and chaplet bracelets, and often receive them as gifts for their baptism, first Communion or confirmation. However, they are not toys, and children who use rosary beads as handcuffs on their little brothers should be corrected, gently but clearly.

A chaplet is a vocal prayer and can be prayed as a petition, or in adoration, or for motives of thanksgiving, or in reparation for personal sins or the sins of the nation. Typically, a chaplet follows a set sequence of prayers and then repeats those sequences, commonly known as “decades” of ten or seven repetitions. Typically, there are three, five, seven or nine “decades,” and again the most common is the Rosary, which consists of five decades of one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and the Glory Be.

By nature a chaplet is based on repetition, but if the person prays it with attention and devotion it does not have to be repetitious. Repetition does not suggest lack of originality, any more than Beethoven’s Fifth — which states, repeats, inverts and varies the theme — is considered to be repetitious or unoriginal.

Sometimes you hear people criticize devotions such as the Rosary or the Divine Mercy Chaplet for being simplistic and boring because the prayers are very common and repeated frequently. But there is nothing boring about a rose in full bloom, even though every petal in the blossom is just like the next.

Down through the ages popes have recommended that the faithful pray the Rosary — every day if possible. That’s what St. John Paul II did, as well as Mother Teresa and Padre Pio.

Since a Rosary or the Divine Mercy Chaplet is a personal devotional, it can always be accommodated to fit the need and the circumstances of the situation. Many have discovered that, while the Rosary is made up of simple prayers — the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be — these prayers are very powerful. After all, the Our Father (the Lord’s Prayer) was given to us by Jesus Christ himself; the Hail Mary by an archangel, St. Elizabeth and the Church; and the Glory Be is rooted in the Old Testament angelic praises from the Book of Daniel. It would be difficult to improve on those prayers!

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Prayer

The Rosary and the Battle of Lepanto

D.D. Emmons

February 13, 2019 9:43 pm February 13, 2019

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On Oct. 7, 1571, two years after the Vatican urged the Rosary for universal use, an event took place that caused the devotion to gain widespread popularity. One of the…

On Oct. 7, 1571, two years after the Vatican urged the Rosary for universal use, an event took place that caused the devotion to gain widespread popularity. One of the most famous (and bloodiest) naval battles in history took place that day on the Bay of Lepanto, off the coast of Greece. The opposing forces were Christians, made up of an alliance of fleets from Spain and Italy, against a far superior Turkish navy. The Muslim force was threatening to take over the Mediterranean Sea and hence be in a position to attack European countries. Pope Pius V asked the Christian faithful to pray the Rosary and seek the intercession of the Blessed Mother to defeat the Muslim navy. Despite being outnumbered, the Christian fleet prevailed. Accordingly, Pope Pius established Oct. 7 as a feast day of Our Lady of Victory, thus perpetually bringing honor to the Blessed Mother for her assistance. In 1573, Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572-85) changed the name of the feast to Our Lady of the Rosary, a feast the Church continues to celebrate.

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3 min read

Prayer

Are Sinners’ Prayers Heard?

Msgr. Charles E. Pope

February 13, 2019 9:12 pm February 13, 2019

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It depends a bit on what is meant by the word “hear.” It can never be argued in a literal sense that God cannot hear something. For nothing escapes God’s…

It depends a bit on what is meant by the word “hear.” It can never be argued in a literal sense that God cannot hear something. For nothing escapes God’s notice, and in no sense could He be said to be incapable of hearing a prayer.

However, if “hear” means that a prayer would be favorably received by God, that is another matter.

Generally, it would seem that God pays little heed to the prayers of unrepentant mortal sinners, though there are surely some exceptions. For example, in Scripture we read, “No, the hand of the Lord is not too short to save, / nor his ear too dull to hear. / Rather, it is your crimes that separate you from God, / It is your sins that make him hide his face / so that he does not hear you” (Is 59:1-2). Or again, “Those who shut their ears to the cry of the poor / will themselves call out and not be answered” (Prv 21:13).

So it would seem that there is a good basis for concluding that unrepentant mortal sinners are going to have a pretty hard time getting their prayers answered as they would like.

However, experience teaches that even mortal sinners do partake of many of God’s blessings. And this, too, Jesus affirms in Scripture: “The [Lord] makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” (Mt 5:45).

How God chooses to bless or withhold blessings from the unrighteous is therefore not an all or nothing proposition, but is caught up in the mystery of His providence. Perhaps He knows a person will one day repent; perhaps He knows that an answered prayer now will help lead to repentance later. Perhaps, too, He knows that to withhold a blessing is the better course. Thus God remains sovereign in applying wisdom to each situation.

That said, we ought to remain sober about the need to pray in righteousness. For if God cannot trust us with the blessings we already have, why should He trust us with further blessings?

The First Letter of John has some advice about praying with and for those in serious sin: “If anyone sees his brother sinning, if the sin is not deadly, he should pray to God and he will give him life. This is only for those whose sin is not deadly. There is such a thing as deadly sin, about which I do not say that you should pray. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not deadly” (5:15-17). While the instruction of John here is complex, he is saying in effect that, if we are reasonably sure that someone is in serious sin, we ought skip over praying for lesser things like a new job for them, etc. Rather the essential and only really efficacious prayer for them is to pray for their repentance. For to be dead in sins is to rather powerfully block any other blessings.

So, while God can bless even serious sinners, we ought not presuppose that He will do so and make our priority to pray for lifesaving repentance.

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1 min read

Prayer

Do Non-Christians Pray Through Christ?

Father Ray Ryland

January 21, 2019 7:54 am January 21, 2019

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1 min read

Paul’s Letter to the Romans assures us that God has left no one without some knowledge of himself. “For what can be known about God is evident to them, because…

Paul’s Letter to the Romans assures us that God has left no one without some knowledge of himself. “For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (1:19-20).

Though all non-Christian religions contain error, they also have elements of God’s truth. Wherever God reveals His truth to any degree, He always reveals through His Son. “All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Mt 11:27).

Whenever a non-Christian prays to God, whatever of truth he knows and whatever of true love for God he reveals, that person is in fact praying through the Jesus Christ he does not know. Whatever of God’s truth is in that person’s mind and attitude must be pleasing to God.

The Church teaches that persons who truly love and serve God as best they can know Him can be saved. But they are saved by the truth they profess, not the error which their religions have imparted to them.

That truth comes to them through God’s Son, Jesus Christ. Therefore the Church has to proclaim that, ultimately, no one can be saved except through Jesus Christ.

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6 min read

Prayer

Does God Hear Me?

Mary DeTurris Poust

January 20, 2019 11:14 am January 20, 2019

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6 min read

We live in a world of instant gratification. If we have a question, we send out a text or an email and receive a response within minutes, sometimes seconds. If…

We live in a world of instant gratification. If we have a question, we send out a text or an email and receive a response within minutes, sometimes seconds. If we want something, anything, we stop in a store or hop online and it’s in our hands or at our doorstep almost immediately. It’s no wonder, then, that when we send up prayers to God, our urgent requests for things we need or want (or want to avoid), we expect a quick, clear answer, preferably made-to-order.

So we pray, and then sit back and wait. And wait, and wait, and wonder, “Why doesn’t God hear me?” Or, if He does hear me, why won’t He answer? In truth, it’s not that God doesn’t hear us, but that we don’t hear — or know how to hear — Him. We expect flashes of light, voices from above, or, at the very least, a plain-and-simple answer so obvious that there’s no way to misinterpret or miss it. But, as Elijah learned as he looked for God in the strong wind, in the earthquake and in the fire, sometimes we will find the answer to our prayer in the most unexpected places.

“After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave” (1 Kgs 19:12-13). So it was in the tiny whisper that Elijah finally heard God. Do we quiet our hearts and minds and bodies long enough to hear the whisper of God? Perhaps God is answering our prayers but in the busyness of our lives and the noise of the world around us the message simply can’t get through. We will never know if God is hearing us (and responding to us) unless we make time for silent prayer, not prayers of petition or even prayers of thanksgiving, but a receptive kind of silent, contemplative prayer where we simply sit and wait for God.

When God Seems Close

Most of us have experienced, at one time or another, a moment when God seemed incredibly close. Perhaps we sensed His presence in the voice of a friend who just happened to call when we most needed a listening ear, or maybe it was in the disappointment of a job we didn’t get that eventually led us to the job that seemed tailor-made for us. Sometimes it may be as simple as looking out at the ocean or sunset and feeling a deep God-centered peace that reminds us that life is going along exactly according to plan — maybe not our plan, but God’s plan.

How can we nurture those kinds of God moments in our lives? Through silent prayer, as Pope Benedict XVI suggested, as have many saints and holy men and women before him. If we take even a few minutes out of our busy days to sit in silence with God — not asking or talking, but waiting — we can begin to cultivate a receptive attitude that will allow us to recognize that whisper of the Spirit amid the storms and earthquakes of daily life.

Of course, if we find a way to listen truly for God, we may not always like what we hear, which leads to the next part of our question: Why doesn’t God answer my prayers the way I want them to be answered?

Demanding a Response

God is not like an ATM machine. We don’t punch in our prayer request and put out our hands waiting for the exact response. We go to God and pray that someone recovers from an illness or returns from the brink of some disaster. When just the opposite happens, it can certainly feel as though God is not really listening or, if He is, not really interested in what’s best for us. But that’s because we approach God from our humanness. We cannot begin to imagine how God works, what God has planned for us, and why certain requests don’t seem to be answered or heard.

And when our prayers feel unheard or unanswered, we can begin to feel abandoned by or cut off from God. We’re certainly not alone in that feeling. Some of the greatest saints in the history of our faith experienced the “dark night of the soul,” a term coined by St. John of the Cross. More recently, Blessed Mother Teresa’s letters revealed a decades-long dry spell where she felt separated from God.

“As for myself, Father — I have nothing to say — for the darkness is so dark, the pain is so painful. Sometimes the grip of pain is so great — that I can hear my own voice call out — My God, help me.… It is so painful to be lonely for God,” Mother Teresa wrote (“Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” Image).

Faith in the Darkness

Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., who edited two volumes of Mother Teresa’s writings, says that the saintly woman of Calcutta can teach us how to remain faithful despite our feelings of spiritual darkness.

“It does tell us something about what the nature of love is. We hear St. Thomas Aquinas saying, love is in the will. Mother Teresa really embodied that teaching,” he explained. “In our contemporary thinking so much depends on feelings — in love, in friendship, in marriage. In that, if the feeling is gone, then we think we don’t love anymore; we give up. But I think one of the secondary things that Mother Teresa teaches is something of what the nature of love is and fidelity to it.”

In other words, we have to remain constant in our faith, in our prayer life, in our knowledge that God is hearing us, listening to us and answering us in His own time. We cannot hope to understand God on human terms, but we can continually put ourselves before Him, knowing that God longs for us even more than we long for Him. And so we pray, and we wait, and we listen for that still small voice of the Spirit.

Mary DeTurris Poust is the author of “Walking Together: Discovering the Catholic Tradition of Spiritual Friendship” (Ave Maria Press, 2010). Visit her personal blog at www.notstrictlyspiritual.blogspot.com.

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6 min read

Prayer

Nine Days of Prayer: Why Pray Novenas?

Karen Edmisten

January 16, 2019 4:28 pm January 16, 2019

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6 min read

Imagine this: With some trepidation about their future, a small band of people with a newfound faith commit to a period of intense prayer, out of obedience to their spiritual…

Imagine this: With some trepidation about their future, a small band of people with a newfound faith commit to a period of intense prayer, out of obedience to their spiritual master. He has left them seemingly on their own, promising something big on the horizon.

After they follow their leader’s instructions for nine days, God answers their prayers by acting in a singularly dramatic, transformative way. And the world is never the same again.

That’s precisely what happened to Our Lady, the apostles and the other early disciples of Our Lord. After His ascension they prayed, waited and perhaps even felt some anxiety over “losing” Him again.

But they also trusted and persevered. In the end, He rewarded them on the Day of Pentecost with the coming of the Advocate He had promised, the Holy Spirit (see Acts 1:1–2:4).

Jesus had instructed His followers to pray, and they obeyed. They were not disappointed.

Those nine days of prayer can be seen as the model for the Catholic tradition of the novena. A novena (from the Latin novem, “nine”) is a prayer, or set of prayers, prayed for nine days, hours, weeks or even months.

It is often prayed for a specific intention or grace and may be directed to particular saints for their intercession.

Sometimes non-Catholics, and even a few Catholics, may ask, “Why should we pray novenas?” The short answer is simply that Jesus Christ calls us to pray. In fact, He tells us to “pray always without becoming weary” (Lk 18:1), to pray with persistence.

We’ll never go wrong when we obey Christ. He promises that prayer works, and He often responds with electrifying results.

But that’s only the first, most fundamental reason why we should pray novenas. A look at the history of this tradition provides ample encouragement for making it a personal practice.
Historical Background

Over the centuries, four specific types of novenas have emerged: novenas for mourning, preparation, petition and indulgences.

Novenas of mourning are the earliest type. They probably grew out of an early Christian custom of offering nine days of Masses for the departed. The global Church witnessed such a novena in 2005 with the death of Pope John Paul II.

Preparation novenas are joyful and anticipatory. They look toward major feasts (such as a Christmas novena) or celebrate the founder of a religious order.

Novenas of petition developed historically among the laity. They most likely originated as petitions for good health and eventually became generalized to include requests for other needs as well. For instance, a novena to St. Hubert, for protection against madness caused by a dog bite, was first prayed in medieval times and is still prayed today.

Many other novenas of prayer, directed to saints for special intentions, have proliferated over time.

The final type of novena, the novena for indulgences, overlaps with the others. The Church offers partial and plenary indulgences for more than 30 novenas, including one of the most recent, the Divine Mercy novena.

If the Church has not only approved and recommended a variety of novenas, but has also designated certain novenas as a prerequisite for an indulgence, we can be sure that these prayers are much more than just an instance of popular piety.

The Church recognizes the special value of the novena, whose form is particularly suited to overcome certain tendencies of our fallen human nature.

Boon to Prayer Life

We concupiscent human beings tend toward laziness. Countering that tendency, the repetitive form of the novena can serve to intensify and reinforce our prayer life. It forms a habit of persevering prayer in those of us who, left to our own devices, may fall away from prayer despite the best intentions.

Fallen human beings also tend toward rebellion. We balk at being told what to do. But following a divine prescription such as a novena can be the perfect remedy for such rebelliousness.

In praying a prescribed set of prayers, for a prescribed length of time, we are drawn out of ourselves and our vanities and into prayerful concentration and obedience. In this way, our prayer time is kept on track, becoming more focused by observing a set form.

A novena can also release us from a false attitude that we are somehow in control of a situation and its outcome through our prayers for a desired result.

With its repeated appeal to divine aid, the novena recognizes that we are helpless without God, and that control of the situation is squarely in His hands.

We are like the desperate widow in Jesus’ parable who repeatedly asked the judge for help — whose humble, persistent petitions the Lord offers as a model in prayer (see Lk 18:1-7).

To suggest that with a novena we relinquish (rather than make a play for) control may contradict popular perceptions. After all, some novenas actually promise “never to fail” should we meticulously follow their directions.

Of course, such instructions (always tacked on anonymously) are little more than superstition. Novenas are not magic and cannot manipulate the Divine Will. After praying in a specific way for a specific number of days, we are no more in control than we were at the start.

Instead, we receive from God a result of His own choosing. Our part is simply to demonstrate faithfulness in our commitment to prayer.

That’s not to say, of course, that novenas aren’t powerful. They certainly are, as is any faithfully attended prayer. A novena may even lead to miraculous results.

So, even though the specific, “guaranteed” promises attached to a number of novenas needn’t be taken literally, they do reflect the confidence in this approach to petition that has grown through the experiences of millions who have received answers to their prayers.

Novenas Work

In short, novenas work, and we should pray them because they are a valuable form of conversation with God and His saints. They flow from faith, and God always attends to the prayers of His faithful.

We may or may not get what we want. But as we pray novenas, we are praising, preparing, waiting and trusting. And we will be rewarded, just as Christ’s first disciples were, in whatever way God sees fit.

Perhaps, then, what “never fails” when we pray a novena is that we always grow in faithful perseverance. And again, like the first disciples, we will not be disappointed.

Karen Edmisten is the author of “The Rosary: Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary” (St. Anthony Messenger, 2009).

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