‘Prayer should always be spontaneous and free’

In Wednesday’s audience, the Pope expressed his sorrow from St. Peter’s Square for the civilians “machined” in Gaza and for the Spanish city covered in mud. He then placed a flower before the “Virgin of the Forsaken”, patron saint of Valencia, and prayed the Hail Mary with the faithful. Catechism on prayer “the sanctifying action of the Holy Spirit”, advocate before God.

Vatican City () – “Very sad.” For the pain of the civilians murdered in Gaza – “the other day 153 civilians walking down the street were machine-gunned” – and also for Valencia, devastated by the extreme weather phenomenon called Dana, which left 222 victims, and 89 people still missing. This is how Pope Francis said he felt this morning in St. Peter’s Square, during Wednesday’s general audience. In the square, the image of the Virgen de los Desamparados, patron saint of the third city in Spain, stood out, in front of which the Pope placed a flower. “The Virgin who cares for the poor, the patron saint of Valencia. “Valencia is suffering a lot, and so are other places in Spain,” he said at the beginning.

In the final greeting to the Italian-speaking pilgrims, he prayed a Hail Mary to the patron saint of Valencia – a city that has been covered in mud and has not received favorably the visit of the authorities in recent days – together with the faithful from many countries of the world. “I invite you to pray for Valencia,” he said. “Let us ask the Lord that we may always live with hope.” He also invited everyone listening to pray for peace. “Let us not forget the tormented Ukraine, which suffers so much. Let us not forget Gaza and Israel,” he said. “Let’s not forget Myanmar.”

Francis spoke in today’s catechism about the dimension of prayer, all the more necessary in times of tragedy. “Don’t pray like parrots, please, don’t say ‘blah, blah, blah’, no. Say: ‘Lord’, but say it from the heart. ‘Help me Lord’, ‘I love you, Lord’.” The cycle of reflections dedicated to the Holy Spirit and his “bride”, the Church, then continued. “The Spirit intercedes for us” was the theme of today’s meditation, based on a passage from the Letter to the Romans (Rom 8, 26-27). “The sanctifying action of the Holy Spirit is not only carried out through the Word of God and the Sacraments, but also through prayer, and we want to dedicate today’s reflection to it,” said Pope Francis. He then highlighted two fundamental characteristics of prayer: freedom and spontaneity. “You have to pray when you feel the need to pray in your heart. And when you don’t feel anything, stop and ask yourself: why don’t I feel like praying? What is happening in my life? But what always helps us the most is spontaneity in prayer. “That is what it means to pray as children, not as slaves,” he explained outside the text.

You have to learn to pray. “We don’t know how to pray. We don’t know, we have to learn every day.” However, it is important to do so, because “it is the only power we have over the Holy Spirit.” The power of prayer. You cannot resist prayer. We pray and He comes “, he said. The “weakness” experienced with respect to the sentence is due to a word “that was previously used in three different ways: as an adjective, as a noun and as an adverb,” ​​and that “contains a complete treatise.” , human beings, there was a saying, ‘mali, mala, male petimus’, which means that, being bad (mali), we ask for the wrong things (mala) and in the wrong way (male). to meet the Holy Spirit, who becomes a “paraclete”, that is, lawyer and defender, of each human being.

“He does not accuse us before the Father, but defends us. Yes, he convinces us that we are sinners (see John 16:8), but he does it so that we can taste the joy of the Father’s mercy,” Francis said. And we can all enjoy divine forgiveness, because “God is greater than our sin.” “We are all sinners, but maybe someone thinks, I don’t know, he is afraid of the things he has done, and he is afraid that God will punish him… – the Holy Father said outside the text -. Get in prayer, call on the Holy Spirit and he will teach you how to ask for forgiveness. And do you know one thing? God doesn’t know much grammar, and when we ask for forgiveness he doesn’t let us finish the word ‘sorry’… ‘sorry…’, right there, he doesn’t let us finish the word ‘sorry’, and he forgives us first. “He always forgives us.”

The Holy Spirit intercedes for those who call on him, but he also teaches to intercede for his brothers. “He teaches us the prayer of intercession. Pray for this person, pray for those who are in prison, pray even for the mother-in-law, eh? Always pray. Always.” It is one of the prayers that God likes the most” because it is “free and disinterested.” “When each person prays for everyone, it happens – this was what Saint Ambrose said – that everyone prays for each one; prayer multiplies. Prayer is like this. It is a very valuable and necessary task in the Church, especially in this time of preparation for the Jubilee: to unite with the Paraclete who intercedes for all of us. By the designs of God,” concluded Pope Francis.