ROME — The Church’s essential task is praying and teaching others to pray, Pope Francis declared during his weekly General Audience on Wednesday.
Prayer is “the breath of faith,” the pontiff stated during his live-streamed address from the Library of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, and “we grow in faith inasmuch as we learn to pray.”
“After certain passages in life, we become aware that without faith we could not have made it and that our strength was prayer – not only personal prayer, but also that of our brothers and sisters, and of the community that accompanied and supported us, of the people who know us, of the people we ask to pray for us,” he added.
The Church is “a great school of prayer,” Francis said, and “communities and groups dedicated to prayer flourish in the Church. Some Christians even feel the call to make prayer the primary action of their day.”
“There are monasteries, convents, hermitages in the Church where persons consecrated to God live,” he continued, referring to those religious dedicated to the contemplative life. “They often become centres of spiritual light.”
These convents are “centres of community prayer that radiate spirituality,” the pope said, “small oases in which intense prayer is shared and fraternal communion is constructed day by day.”
Praying and working in community keeps the world going, he said, and that is why the devil works so hard to keep people from praying.
“Everything in the Church originates in prayer and everything grows thanks to prayer,” he said. “When the Enemy, the Evil One, wants to combat the Church, he does so first by trying to drain her fonts, hindering them from praying.”
And when Satan succeeds and prayer stops, “the Church becomes aware that it has become like an empty shell, that it has lost its bearings, that it no longer possesses its source of warmth and love,” he said.
“And prayer is what opens the door to the Holy Spirit, who inspires progress,” he insisted. “Changes in the Church without prayer are not changes made by the Church.”
The pope went on to assert that the saints do not have easier lives than other people but have found the secret strength that is found in prayer.
“Holy women and men do not have easier lives than other people,” he said. “But their strength is prayer. They always draw from the inexhaustible “well” of Mother Church.”
“The saints, who often count for little in the eyes of the world, are in reality the ones who sustain it, not with the weapons of money and power, of the communications media – and so forth – but with the weapon of prayer,” he added.
This is “the Church’s essential task: to pray and to teach how to pray,” he said. “To transmit the lamp of faith and the oil of prayer from generation to generation.”
“Without faith everything collapses; and without prayer faith is extinguished,” Francis said. “Faith and prayer together. There is no other alternative.”
“The question that we Christians need to ask ourselves is: Do I pray? Do we pray? How do I pray?” he said.
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