The Dispatch: More from CWR...

A Year of Prayer, a Year of Action

Prayer must take the lead and retain its primacy, and when it doesn’t, all concrete action becomes self-serving and useless.

(Image: Ben White | Unsplash.com)

In advance of the Jubilee Year of 2025, Pope Francis declared 2024 a Year of Prayer—a time “dedicated to rediscovering the great value and absolute need for prayer in personal life, in the life of the Church, and in the world.” The declaration comes at a fascinating time in America: a polarizing presidential election has heightened the nation’s spiritual and mental tensions, and celebrity converts are increasingly bringing prayer—not simply meditation, but religious prayer—to the forefront of the cultural conversation. More fervent and frequent prayer is just what the soul doctor ordered.

However, the Year of Prayer may have slipped by many people’s notice, and if you’re just catching wind of this papal summons, I would encourage you to look to the resources of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, where (full disclosure) I serve as Publishing Director. The ministry has just released Bishop Robert Barron’s Introduction to Prayer, an inexpensive paperback that—in light of the pope’s call—orients readers to spiritual basics: Why should I pray? What are the different types of prayer? And what should I say or do when I’m praying? It’s also led massively successful campaigns encouraging the prayer of the Rosary and the Holy Hour, with participants from all around the world logging their prayers on a digital map. And it continues to pour itself into the Word on Fire Bible and Liturgy of the Hours projects, which are opening up the Sacred Scriptures and the Divine Office—the highest form of prayer behind the Mass—to countless people.

The work of Word on Fire also witnesses to a key quality of Christian prayer—namely, that it’s not separate from concrete action; on the contrary, the two wholly interpenetrate. Even this ministry’s calls to prayer are highly active work, just as all of its active work is born of deep prayer. Thus, we see a wonderful play between, and invitation into, contemplation and education, upward worship and outward evangelization—the two informing and cultivating each other in the Way of Christian life.

This communion of prayer and action surely stands behind the pope’s call for prayer. Indeed, there’s an illuminating line about prayer attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order: “Pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on you.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2834) presents the line in tandem with the Benedictine motto Ora et labora—“Pray and work.”

In a culture that so often pits “thoughts and prayers” against concrete action and activism, both maxims capture the great “both/and” of the Church in the face of this dilemma: a Christian can neither seal himself up in prayer nor lose himself in action; instead, he must be a person of both. For both the Gnostic Christian and the atheistic humanist, a call to prayer is a call to fly away from the messiness of the world—one interpreting that flight positively, the other negatively. But for the Catholic, it’s a call to enter into the messiness of the world, precisely because it’s a call to pray for it.

But Ignatius’ original line—at least, the closest thing to the original, taken from a book of Ignatian wisdom assembled after the saint’s death—heightens the paradoxical nature of this both/and in a way that the popularized version doesn’t: “Let your first rule of action be to trust in God as if success depended entirely on yourself and not on him: but use all your efforts as if God alone did everything, and yourself nothing.” This counsel—so disorienting in its mutual reversals—draws us into the incarnational quality of Christian prayer. The man of faith allows his deepest prayer to well up in his greatest efforts, and his greatest efforts to empty out into his deepest prayer, each conditioning and flowing into the other.

This isn’t to turn prayer into a kind of accelerant of social justice—a joining of prayer and action that gets their connection correct, but their relationship upside-down. Indeed, there’s a popular quote attributed to Pope Francis online—one that first emerged on the internet in 2014 without any source— that falls into precisely this distortion: “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.” There’s an element of truth in the line, but it’s a one-sided truth. It suggests an immanentizing of faith, a sealing up of its power in the horizontal plane of human will and social service. In short, it lacks the other side of the Ignatian paradox, which refers all of our action back to God.

The pope’s authentic (and more balanced) thoughts on prayer and action can be found in a July 2013 Angelus message:

A prayer that does not lead you to practical action for your brother—the poor, the sick, those in need of help, a brother in difficulty—is a sterile and incomplete prayer. But, in the same way, when ecclesial service is attentive only to doing, things gain in importance, functions, structures, and we forget the centrality of Christ. When time is not set aside for dialogue with him in prayer, we risk serving ourselves and not God present in our needy brother and sister.

In other words: prayer must take the lead and retain its primacy, and when it doesn’t, all concrete action becomes self-serving and useless.

May the Year of Prayer bear good fruit over the next three months, and, in the spirit of Ignatius, lead us into those depths of trust that act with boldness—and those heroic efforts that abandon everything to God.


If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!

Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.


About Matthew Becklo 8 Articles
Matthew Becklo is a writer, editor, and the Publishing Director for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. His writing is featured at Word on Fire, Strange Notions, and Aleteia, and has also appeared in Inside the Vatican magazine and the Evangelization & Culture journal, and online at First Things, RealClear Religion, and The Catholic Herald. He has also contributed an essay for Wisdom and Wonder: How Peter Kreeft Shaped the Next Generation of Catholics, and edited multiple books, including the Word on Fire Classics volume the Flannery O’Connor Collection.

3 Comments

  1. We are regular Mass/Liturgy goers. I asked my DH if he knew anything about 2024 being a Year of Prayer. He thought about it, then said “Well, I knew about the Eucharistic thing…” (It was nowhere near us and not mentioned at our parish in any manner. Not even the bulletin.)
    Now DH reads the Bible and prays on a regular basis. Even taking shifts doing Adoration at a local parish (not ours).
    Neither one of us had heard about 2024 being a Year of Prayer. Or 2025 being a jubilee Year. I am guessing the rank and file clergy aren’t interested in relaying pronouncements from higher up.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative or inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.


*