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Illustration: David composing the Psalms, Paris Psalter, 10th century[1]
Pope Francis Cycle of Catechesis. The Spirit and the Bride 4
The Holy Spirit guides the people of God towards Jesus our hope.
Saint Peter’s Square – Wednesday, 19 June 2024
Cycle of Catechesis. The Spirit and the Bride.
The Holy Spirit guides the people of God towards Jesus our hope. 4.
The Spirit teaches the Bride to pray. The Psalms, symphony of prayer in the Bible
Dear brothers and sisters,
In preparation for the next Jubilee, I invited the devotion of the year 2024 “to a great ‘symphony’ of prayer”. [1] With today’s catechesis, I would like to recall that the Church already has a symphony of prayer, whose composer is the Holy Spirit, and it is the Book of Psalms.
As in any symphony, it contains different “movements”, that is, different genres of prayer:
praise, thanksgiving, supplication, lament, narration, spiritual reflection, and others, both in the personal form and in the choral form of the whole people.
These are the songs that the Spirit himself has placed on the lips of the Bride, His Church.
I mentioned last time tha all the Books of the Bible, are inspired by the Holy Spirit,
but the Book of Psalms is also so in the sense that it is full of poetic inspiration.
The Psalms have had a special place in the New Testament.
In fact, there have been and still are editions that contain the New Testament and the Psalms together. On my desk I have a Ukrainian edition of this New Testament and the Psalms that was sent to me by a soldier who died in the war. And he prayed on the front line with this book.
Not all the Psalms – and not all of every Psalm – can be repeated and made their own by Christians and even less so by modern man.
They sometimes reflect a historical situation and a religious mentality that are no longer our own.
This does not mean that they are not inspired, but in certain aspects they are linked to a time and a temporary stage of revelation, as is also the case with a large part of ancient legislation.
What makes the Psalms so attractive to us is that they were the prayer of Jesus, of Mary, of the Apostles and of all the Christian generations that have preceded us.
When we recite them, God listens to them with that magnificent “orchestration” that is the communion of saints.
According to the Letter to the Hebrews, Jesus came into the world with a verse from a Psalm in His heart: “Behold, I have come to do thy will, O God” (cf. Heb 10:7; Ps 40:9), and He departed from the world, according to the Gospel of Luke, with another verse on His lips: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit” (Lk 23:46, cf. Ps 31:6 – I trust in the Lord).
The use of the Psalms in the New Testament is followed by that of the Fathers and of the whole Church, which makes them an integral part of the celebration of the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours.
“All Sacred Scripture breathes the goodness of God”, says Saint Ambrose, “but especially the sweet book of the Psalms” [2].
I wonder: do you sometimes pray with the Psalms?
Take the Bible or the New Testament and pray a psalm.
For example, when you are a little sad for having sinned, do you pray Psalm 50?
There are many psalms that help us keep going.
Get into the habit of praying with the Psalms.
I assure you that you would be happy in the end.
But we cannot live only on the heritage of the past: it is necessary to make the Psalms our prayer.
It has been written that we ourselves must become, in a certain sense, “scribes” of the Psalms, making them our own and praying with them. [3]
If there are psalms, or even just verses, that speak to our heart, it is good to repeat them and pray them throughout the day.
The Psalms are prayers “for all seasons”: there is no state of mind or need that does not find in them the best words to be turn into prayer.
Unlike other prayers, the Psalms do not lose their effectiveness by dint of being repeated; on the contrary, they increase it.
Why is this so? Because they are inspired by God and “breathe” God, each time they are read with faith.
When we feel oppressed by remorse or guilt, because we are sinners, we can repeat with David: “Be merciful to me, O God, according to thy steadfast love” (Ps 51:1), Psalm 51.
If we want to express a strong personal bond with love, let us say: “O God, you are my God / I seek you, / my soul thirsts for you; / my flesh faints for you, / as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Ps 63:1), Psalm 63.
It is not for nothing that the liturgy has included this Psalm in the Sunday Lauds and the solemn celebrations.
And when fear and anxiety assail us, those wonderful words of Psalm 23 come to our rescue: “The Lord is my shepherd … Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, / I fear no evil” (Ps 23:1,4).
The Psalms allow us not to impoverish our prayer by reducing it merely to requests, to a continuous “give me, give us…”.
We learn from the Lord’s Prayer, that before asking for our “daily bread”, we say, “Hallowed by thy name; thy Kingdom come, thy will be done”.
The Psalms help us to open ourselves to a prayer that is less focused on ourselves: a prayer of praise, of blessing, of thanksgiving; and they also help us give voice to the whole of creation, including it in our praise.
Brothers and sisters, may the Holy Spirit, who gave the Bride of the Church the words to pray to her divine Bride, help us to make them resound in the Church today, and to make this year of preparation for the Jubilee a true symphony of prayer. Thank you!
[1] Letter to Archbishop Fisichella for the Jubilee 2025 (11 February 2022).
[2] Comment on the Psalms I, 4, 7: CSEL 64,4-7.
[3] Giovanni Cassiano, Conlationes, X,11: SCh 54, 92-93.
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Summary of the Holy Father’s words
Today we continue our catechesis on the Holy Spirit, who teaches the Church, as the Bride of Christ, how to pray. For our symphony of prayer in preparation for the coming Jubilee, we turn to the poetry of the Psalms, just as that great “orchestra”, the communion of saints, has done since the earliest days of the Church.
The Psalms express every movement of this symphony and echo every emotion of our hearts in words that often convey wonder, sorrow, and hope. The more often we repeat these inspired prayers, the stronger and more effective they become. May the Holy Spirit enrich our prayer with this gift, enabling us to give voice to all creation and to include it in our praise.
