A Year of Prayer, a Year of Action

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.