How Does the Pope Pray?
How -- and for whom -- does the Pope pray?
You would have to ask the Holy Spirit! The Pope prays as the Holy Spirit permits him to pray. I think he has to pray in a way in which, deepening the mystery revealed in Christ, he can better fulfill his ministry. The Holy Spirit certainly guides him in this. But man must not put up obstacles. "The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness." ...
Because the Pope is a witness of Christ and a minister of the Good News, he is a man of joy and a man of hope, a man of the fundamental affirmation of the value of existance, the value of creation and of hope in the future life. Naturally, this is neither a naive joy, nor a vain hope. The joy of the victory over evil does not obfuscate -- it actually intensifies -- the realistic awareness of the existence of evil in the world and in every man. The Gospel teaches us to call good and evil by name, but it also teaches: "Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good" (Rom. 12:21). ...
The Pope, like every Christian, must be keenly aware of the dangers to which man is subject in the world, in his temporal future, and in his final, eternal, eschatological future. The awareness of these dangers does not generate pessimism, but rather encourages the struggle for the victory of good in every realm. And it is precisely from this struggle for the victory of good in man and in the world that the need for prayer arises.
The Pope's prayer, however, has an added dimension. In his concern for all the churches every day the pontiff must open his prayer, his thought, his heart to the entire world. Thus a kind of geography of the Pope's prayer is sketched out. It is a geography of communities, churches, societies, and also of the problems that trouble the world today. In this sense the Pope is called to a universal prayer ... [which] permits him to set forth before God all the joys and hopes as well as the griefs and anxieties that the Church shares with humanity today.
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