Lord, Please Don't Hear This Prayer

Reprinted with permission of the Denver Catholic Register.

As I understand the theory behind the General Intercessions or Prayer of the Faithful, the petitions are supposed to be short and rather formulaic: we are to pray for the universal Church and its pastor, the local Church and its pastors, the civil authorities, the sick, the dead and dying, and the world's salvation, adding special local needs as required.

Yet the subscription services that supply many parishes with their general intercessions often turn the petitions into mini-sermons in which various messages, theological and political, are encoded. I particularly dislike the now-widespread custom of jumping immediately from a pro forma prayer for the universal Church or the Pope to a second, much lengthier petition for some political desideratum, often accompanied by a protracted secondary clause suggesting, not too subtly, that all social goods are to be secured by government action.

These canned petitions do have one use, though: they reflect with considerable precision the default positions on certain questions in today's U.S. Catholic establishment.

Take, for example, a petition I heard (in the #2 slot, of course) a few weeks ago: "That all world leaders may put aside their political differences and work for true and lasting peace, let us pray to the Lord." I didn't. Why? Because that petition, however innocently crafted, reflects a host of misconceptions about world politics, world peace, and world order: misconceptions that I have been trying to counter - evidently, without much success! - for more than a quarter-century.

Why couldn't I answer "Lord, hear our prayer" to the petition I just cited?

First, because I don't believe that "political differences," in the normal sense of that term, define the fault-lines in world politics today. The differences between the civilized world and Al-Qaeda, or between the United States and North Korea, or between Christian blacks and Muslim Arabs in Sudan, or between the Russians of Beslan and the terrorists who held their children hostage and then murdered them in cold blood, are not "political differences"-if by "political differences" we mean disagreements about the best means to achieve commonly-agreed public goods.

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