One of the sillier jokes told about Catholics is the one about the guy who gets ushered inside the pearly gates by St. Peter. As Pete shows him around the Elysian fields, they pass by a little gothic structure and hear voices praying in Latin.
“Shh!” says Peter and leads the new arrival tiptoe past the little building.
Out of earshot, the new arrival turns to Peter and says, “What’s up with those guys?”
Peter says, “Those are the Catholics. They think they’re the only ones here.”
Some laugh. But truth to tell, that’s a completely false view of average Catholic piety and prayer. The Church is, in fact, wildly promiscuous with its prayer life. Everybody gets prayed for by the Catholic Church. Sooner or later, after mentioning all those people you always pray for as an ordinary Catholic—family, friends, enemies, people from the office and church, that guy who cut you off on the freeway this morning, the pope, bishops, priests, favorite religious, politicians, movie stars in embarrassing situations, athletes, rock stars, and sundry media types—you then go on and cover all the bases you might normally miss (Hitler, Osama bin Laden, that wino you remember seeing when you were twelve) with the great all-purpose prayer “for all those who have no one to pray for them.” And if you don’t get around to it as a layperson in your daily devotions, there’s always the liturgy during the Triduum, when everyone with and without a pulse gets a mention before the throne of grace.
There’s a huge generosity of spirit there that roughly corresponds to the great pagan Greek impulse of cautious piety. The ancients prayed to the Unknown God; we pray for the Unknown Sinner.
That’s the first thing that sticks out when we look at Catholics at prayer. It’s a phenomenon that reminds me of Chesterton’s remarks about the supposed contrast between “gentle Jesus” and the “harsh, forbidding Church.” He wrote:
We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters. Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering. That popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the incredible compassion of God. But nobody with his eyes open can doubt that it is chiefly this idea of compassion that the popular machinery of the Church does seek to carry. The popular imagery carries a great deal to excess the sentiment of ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.’ It is the first thing that the outsider feels and criticises in a Pieta or a shrine of the Sacred Heart. As I say, while the art may be insufficient, I am not sure that the instinct is unsound. In any case there is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a marketplace, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite. The Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the most merciful face or aspect towards men; but it is certainly the most merciful aspect that she does turn.
So while our Lord is unafraid to remind his followers that sometimes you should not beat your head against a wall with some hard-hearted enemy who won’t listen and who only wants to destroy you (“Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you” [Matthew 7:6]), yet his Church is not especially eager to make that judgment call till the last possible minute. Similarly, while St. John (following his Master) tells us, “There is sin which is mortal; I do not say that one is to pray for that” (1 John 5:16), Catholics, still and all, have a long history of praying for those in a state of mortal sin anyway. So outsized is the Catholic instinct to keep hoping for the sinner to the bitter end that one early theologian Origen speculated that God’s grace was so overwhelming that, in the end, even the devil himself would be saved.2 The Church rejected that speculation, and my point here is not to reignite Origenism (I accept the Church’s teaching). Rather my point is that this impulse to pray for the worst of the worst is a deep structural feature in Catholic culture. Catholic prayer, both in liturgy and in popular piety, is marked by a stubborn refusal to refuse prayer for anybody—a refusal that finds its expression in the last of the spiritual works of mercy.
Witness the beautiful gush of quite sincere prayer for atheist provocateur Christopher Hitchens when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. I think the vast bulk of these prayers were basically motivated by ordinary human and Christian compassion. In my own case, a favorite priest friend of mine died of esophageal cancer, and it was painful to watch him slowly starve to death. So I prayed for Hitchens, as did a bunch of others, because that’s what you do: pray for the living and the dead. Hitchens is alive. Good enough for me. Let’s pray. We can quarrel with him when we’re done. And such expressions of agenda-free charity do touch the heart—even Hitchens’s heart. As he said in an interview: “I have to say there’s some extremely nice people…have said that I’m in their prayers, and I can only say that I’m touched by the thought.”3
I tend to approach prayer not as a saint but as a manual laborer. It’s a duty I feel, not especially a thing I like doing or feel competent at. On my blog I started getting sundry prayer requests from random readers and began posting them, largely because I feel inept as an intercessory pray-er. I hoped that maybe somebody out there in cyberspace might have the charism I lack in having a clue how to pray. I thought I was very clever fobbing this off on others, but I stupidly failed to foresee that this would inevitably result in lots more prayer requests. I continue to post them, along with my fumbling blather in the ear of the Almighty, advising him on how to proceed. I haven’t the slightest idea whether my prayers do a lick of good for the person making the request. But I figure that if I mix my prayers in with those of others who are closer to the throne, then maybe they’ll get lost in the pack and I’ll look as if I know what I’m doing.
Also, I think such prayers, whatever they do for those requesting prayer, have done me good in simply building the discipline of prayer. I have found that, over time, I am not as prone to strategizing about earthly junk or giving in to the idea that there’s no hope, but rather I focus on God.
Of which more next time.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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