Three thoughts about prayers

In the wake of the murder of children during Mass in a Minneapolis church, various politicians excoriated people who expressed sympathy by sending “thoughts and prayers.” It’s not the first time politicians have taken umbrage at that expression, but let’s consider three aspects of their reaction: the centrality of politics, misplaced outrage, and their “theology” of prayer.

Politics are central

Politicians who complain about “thoughts and prayers,” especially after a mass shooting, most likely do so because, in their heart of hearts, they really don’t think prayer does anything.  In that sense, they are breathing the gases of Karl Marx: religion promises pie-in-the-sky-after-you-die so that the powerless are diverted from taking on the power holders.

Marx, of course, linked that to outright atheism.  Since that might not play well in parts of the country—especially when the votes of a few “deplorables” still “clinging to guns and religion” might tip a close race—we usually get some anodyne “spiritual” agnosticism.  It’s the therapeutic voice that questions suffering without really believing it has any sense.

The anti-prayer politicians—liberals, mostly Democrats — doubt prayer will really do much to alter the landscape of how they see “haves” and “have nots” in America.  What they want is palpable action and, for them, that means more gun regulation.  Without getting into the constitutional or practical questions that raises, let’s just admit: for those politicians, “thoughts and prayers” are the NRA’s opium of the people.

This worldview makes politics central.  The way you achieve things is by engaging in politics: speechifying, demonstrating, protesting, legislating, and regulating.  That’s effective.  Prayer is a diversion.

That’s why much of the American Left today has the appearance of a pseudo-religion, complete with creed, morality, rituals, and heresy police.  The “I’m-spiritual-but-not-religious” instinctively feel the need for something to fill the human heart’s restlessness for the true good, but they don’t want to consciously embrace that Summum Bonum.  So, they adopt politics as a substitute.  It’s also why, in my opinion, many folks on X and TikTok post videos that make you question their grip on reality: they’re frustrated because their full-time pursuit of the “good” remains … frustrated.

It is frustrated because they want politics to do what it cannot do: save us.  Politics will not take away the sins of the world.  The mystery of evil remains, even if we try to soften that truth by talking about “senseless violence.”  Evil will be eliminated not by dint of human efforts but only with the Second Coming, an act of God’s grace that completes the salvation about which much of the anti-prayer crowd is practically agnostic.  That’s what William Buckley warned against in his famous line, “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” 

In other words, do not think politics will make the Last Judgment superfluous: salvation happens when “all are subjected to … and God will be all in all” (I Cor 15:28)—not sooner.

Misplaced outrage

“Outrage” is a grossly misunderstood reality.  There’s a certain mindset among some Christians that it is intrinsically evil: the “good” Christian is always a Pollyanna, and so outrage” is “anger” and all anger is a sin.

Well, no. Not at all. A Christian ought to be outraged in the presence of evil.  A Christian ought not to approach evil on the “live-and-let-live” basis of the dictatorship of relativism, which thinks even identifying evil as evil is … evil.  We should oppose evil and some kinds of evil—such as murdering kids in a church—really ought to get our backs up.

Reagan Education Secretary Bill Bennett diagnosed this malady in the title of his book, The Death of Outrage.  You may or may not agree with the book (Bennett was outraged that President Clinton committed adultery in the White House with a subordinate woman young enough to be his daughter and then lied about it to the whole country), but the concept is valid: we have ceased to be shocked by evil.  We ceased to get sufficiently riled up about gross evil.

Consider: 60,000,000 babies have been brutally killed in this country since 1973.  They have been dissected, suctioned, salt-poisoned, starved, had their spinal cords cut, been shot up with lethal cardiac drugs, and left to die in surgical buckets. And most Americans don’t think twice about it.  Some even defend it.  Some of the latter even call themselves “Catholic” while doing it.

So, yes, two children were murdered in Minneapolis.  Since we have been treated to a selective viewpoint of which “lives matter” (given that “all lives matter” was seen by many on the Left as a “racist dog whistle”), one might ask the impolitic question: What bothers some people more—the kids murdered or the fact that guns were used?

If politics didn’t enter the picture, we wouldn’t see efforts to sanitize killers.  A confused “transitioned” young man murdered those kids.  Since “trans” folk are a protected category for the Left, it wasn’t long before the “we may never know the shooter’s motives” chorus kicked in.  It’s a variant on the tune of whenever a guy named “Mohammed” blows something up or rams a car into a crowd: “We may never know what drove the shooter.”

Let’s also consider the venue of this murder: the children were killed in church during Mass.  Sacrilege.  The FBI rightly called it an anti-Catholic “hate crime.”  (One wonders if the previous administration might have instead investigated “hate” against the shooter).

Minnesota and Minneapolis are a “sanctuary” state and city, de facto if not de jure. The very term “sanctuary” has been co-opted.  “Sanctuaries” are the most sacred parts of churches, hitherto often demarcated by that piece of ecclesiastical furniture that triggers some bishops: altar rails.  But as some churchmen have leveled the “sanctuary” (I am thinking of the chicken dance performed last spring in front of the altar of a German cathedral), politicians have seized it as their own.

With the concept “sanctuary” being taken over for political purposes—another manifestation of politics displacing religion discussed above—outrage about the violation of a church seems less full-throated than it should be.  Honestly, I’ve heard greater outrage about illegal aliens being picked up in Home Depot parking lots.

The efficacy of prayer

Finally, critics of “prayers” have their own—and very wrong–“theology” of prayer. 

It’s a variant of the old theodicy problem: there can’t be a god if suffering exists because that god should eliminate suffering.  Similarly, if prayer doesn’t immediately yield the desired results, it impugns its efficacy, leading us back in a vicious circle to the idea that it is just a diversion from “real work.”  (The fact that Protestant America prefers “real work” over prayer says something about the loss of core ideas of the classical Reformation.)

But prayer is not a magic talisman.  Christ is clear that prayer “works” only with the prerequisite of “faith.”  Faith, on the other hand, presupposes a readiness to accept God’s will for our lives, even if it is at variance with our wants and prayers.

Prayer is rarely a one-on-one correspondence: I ask for “A” and God delivers with the speed of Amazon Overnight.  And because it lacks that clear, one-on-one correspondence, critics deem it inefficacious.

September 4th is the feast of the Blessed Martyrs of Nowogródek.  They were eleven Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth Sisters shot by the Gestapo in a forest in what is now Belarus in 1943.  They were taken on a Saturday night to local Gestapo headquarters, brutally interrogated, then driven the next morning to the woods where they were killed.

Why were they shot?  The records are not clear, but perhaps it is a lesson in the indirect lines by which God makes prayer efficacious.  Two weeks earlier, the Germans had arrested 120 men in the city, who might either have been killed or sent for forced labor to the Fatherland.  Their women came to the sisters, begging for prayers.  The sisters complied, praying together that “if a sacrifice is needed, take us, not these family men.”

Shortly after the sisters were murdered, the men were released.

One more variant.  One of the sisters had, years earlier, planned on marriage and had a beau.  She said that she had an inner voice telling her not to marry the man but to go to Grodno (the nearest big city), where “your Bridegroom is waiting, and he will give you a red dress for a wedding present.”  When the sisters were exhumed after the war, their positions in the mass grave were such that the blood of them all poured on that one nun’s habit.  The Bridegroom is always faithful.

Of course, some will dismiss those events as a coincidence, unconnected, and reflecting pious thoughts.  Just like the nine-year-old Maximilian Kolbe’s vision of Our Lady and his wanting the white (virginity) and red (martyrdom) crowns she offered.

Prayer without faith may not be efficacious.  Prayer with faith does not set expectations for God.  That’s perhaps why it’s so much easier to put faith in politics.

I don’t deny that there are also sincere, committed believers who hold to faithful prayer who also want political action.  But I think there are also those for whom “prayer” is at best a soothing, therapeutic notion signifying nothing about which sometimes they let the mask drop.  And when it does, it does because of these three thoughts about prayer.