Prayer is communicating with God to form an intimate, personal relationship with Him. Prayer is important part of the Catholic faith and necessary for the spiritual life.
Catholics develop a relationship with God by communicating with Him through prayer, raising their hearts and minds to Him and putting themselves in his presence. They speak to Him and He speaks to them.
Prayer helps Catholics to strengthen their faith. It is an important way to obtain God’s grace and to cooperate with his grace to achieve salvation.
Catholics use prayer to focus their attention on God and express their feelings to Him. They share all of their concerns and ask Him, even begging Him, to meet all of their needs.
Throughout both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, people can be found praying to God in both good times and in bad times. Jesus prayed often, especially in critical times during his life
Jesus encouraged his disciples to pray often and to pray well. When they asked Him to teach them how to pray. Jesus responded by teaching them the Lord’s Prayer, also called the Our Father.
Guided by the Holy Spirit and what has been revealed in Sacred Scripture and Tradition, Catholics use many different forms and expressions to pray alone or in groups.
Catholic prayer can be expressed vocally, or mentally in mediation or contemplation. Vocal prayer can be said out loud or in silence.
Prayer takes the forms of blessing, petition, intercession, thanksgiving, or praise. The foundation for several Catholic liturgical prayers and spiritual devotions, these forms of prayer should inspire the personal prayer of Catholics.
Prayer is our way of nurturing our relationship with God:
Connecting with God through prayer:
Prayer is intimate sharing with God:
“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father Who sees in secret will repay you. In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.”
Matthew 6: 5-8
Prayer is plugging-in to the source of everything:
Our prayer allows us to cooperate with God in the spiritual world:
God speaks to us through prayer:
Building a relationship with God through prayer:
“Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God.”
Catechism of the Catholic Church 2559
But when we pray, do we speak from the height of our pride and will, or “out of the depths” of a humble and contrite heart?
He who humbles himself will be exalted; humility is the foundation of prayer.
Only when we humbly acknowledge that “we do not know how to pray as we ought,” are we ready to receive freely the gift of prayer.
“Man is a beggar before God.”
Catholics pray like Jesus:
It is in fact in Jesus that man becomes able to approach God in the depth and intimacy of the relationship of fatherhood and sonship. Together with the first disciples, let us now turn with humble trust to the Teacher and ask Him: “Lord, teach us to pray”. In the upcoming Catechesis, in comparing Sacred Scripture, the great tradition of the Fathers of the Church, of the Teachers of spirituality and of the Liturgy, let us learn to live our relationship with the Lord, even more intensely as it were at a “school of prayer”. We know well, in fact, that prayer should not be taken for granted. It is necessary to learn how to pray, as it were acquiring this art ever anew; even those who are very advanced in spiritual life always feel the need to learn from Jesus, to learn how to pray authentically. We receive the first lesson from the Lord by his example. The Gospels describe Jesus to us in intimate and constant conversation with the Father: it is a profound communion of the One who came into the world not to do his will but that of the Father who sent Him for the salvation of man.
Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience, 4 May 2011
There are different types and modes of prayer:
There are five categories of prayer in Christian tradition:
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