When Pope Francis first appeared to the world on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, he humbly requested that the faithful “pray for me.” Those simple words became the punctuation marks of his pontificate, as he ended practically all his speeches, greetings, weekly benedictions and casual conversations with the appeal.
Now, 12 years since his election on March 13, 2013, and a month to the day that he entered the hospital with life-threatening lung infections, the Roman Catholic world is heeding his call and praying for its pope.
Even as the Vatican says that the pope’s condition has seen a “slight improvement,” every evening, Vatican cardinals lead rosary prayers for Francis’ recovery. Parishes around the world, from his native Argentina to the far-flung nations he made it a priority to visit and worship with, are holding prayer sessions. Even Francis’ opponents in the church’s hierarchy, prelates he demoted and fired and who have waged war against the pope’s vision — often over how to pray and worship — are silently saying their prayers.
“At this moment, even people from different ideological or theological inclinations, prayer is bringing them together,” said Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, the secretary of the Vatican’s office for evangelization.
He said Francis’ constant appeal over the past dozen years for people to pray for him was an expression of his humility, that “like any other person, he needs prayer” and God’s help. It was also an expression of Francis’s trust that people, often from other faiths, had the same line of communication to God as he did.
“It is not a question of selfishness,” the archbishop said. “It is a question of human solidarity.”
Prayer has been the lifeblood of faith, the currency between the earthly and spiritual realms, since time immemorial. For Francis, the church’s first Jesuit pope, it has played a major role in a pastoral vision that draws people close to the church by emphasizing blessings and simple acts of devotion over church rules and traditions.
He has often taught that an openness to God’s will, a form of prayer, is central to his decision-making and has preached that a church that prays together stays together.
Now, with his breathing belabored and his body still weak, it is the pope’s own ailing health that has become an additional motivation for the prayer he believes the church needs to thrive.
“I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your prayers for my health from the square,” Francis said in a feeble voice last week, in his only public address since his Feb. 14 hospitalization. “I accompany you from here.” In recent days, he has observed and taken part by video link in spiritual exercises at the Vatican, where his tenuous condition looms over all conversations and rituals.
As Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, the archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica, walked into the Vatican on Tuesday evening for one of those meditations and prayer services for Francis, he said that prayer was “the breath of the soul” and that he and other church leaders, in praying for the pope, prayed “for the breath we all need.”
Cardinal Francis Arinze, a former leader of the church’s worship office under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, said prayer was paramount. In the Bible, he said, followers who prayed to Jesus “got what they were asking.” It showed, he said, that “we need God; we are not almighty. It’s normal.”
Rank-and-file Catholics agreed. In the San Zaccaria church in Venice, an old woman held a rosary that she said Francis had given her. She said that she included him in her prayers. Her 90-year-old priest, the Rev. Carlo Seno, said that he prayed for Francis every day, but that if the pope did not end up recovering, it would not mean that prayer had failed.
“God can intervene in a way that is different from what we hope,” Father Seno said.
Carol Zaleski, an author, with her husband, Philip Zaleski, of “Prayer: A History,” said there were many different types and styles of prayer — petitions and adorations, unspoken and sung, linked to sacrifice or ritual. What was clear was that prayer had accompanied humanity since the beginning and that signs of it went back, at least, to cave drawings.
For the Catholic Church, she said, prayer, like doctrine, had evolved over the centuries. “Lex orandi, lex credendi,” she said, recalling an early Christian formulation that meant prayer and belief were one and the same.
In subsequent centuries, hermit monks in Egypt prayed fervently to survive hunger and the elements. The monasteries of the Middle Ages became what she called the “prayer laboratories” where “they’re doing every kind of prayer.” In the 12th century, St. Dominic of Guzmán, the founder of the Dominican order, reported that the Virgin Mary gave him rosary beads to keep count of Hail Mary recitations.
Prayer took different forms, but the petitions for help or miracles really went into overdrive, she said, “when the enemy is approaching and about to sack your city, or when the plague is killing everybody.” When disaster was averted, prayer got the credit.
After Pope Pius V led a league of Christian fighters in praying the rosary before triumphing over a larger Turkish invasion in the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, a turning point in the history of Europe, the church thanked the Virgin Mary by creating a feast day.
The church still turned to prayer in the face of the world’s greatest challenges.
In 2020, as deaths from Covid surged, Francis stood alone between a wooden cross used to ward off a 16th-century plague and the empty square of St. Peter’s Basilica to offer haunting prayers for the world’s healing. Remembering that occasion, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi told Italian bishops this week that it was now the world’s turn to be “united in prayer for him.”
The call came through to Vincenza De Simone, 69, from Naples, Italy, as she stood in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, reciting the Hail Mary prayer.
“This is an historic moment,” she said, adding that the pope’s sickness was an extra motivation for Catholics across the globe to pray for him.
Archbishop Nwachukwu said that togetherness was something Jesus, who expressly made prayer a pillar of the faith, wanted when he told his followers that God was present wherever two or three people gathered to pray.
On Tuesday evening, cardinals spilled out of the Vatican after a day of spiritual exercises and prayers for Francis that a friar leading meditations said should be hard work.
“After two hours,” said Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, prefect of the church office for Eastern Churches, “we are exhausted.”
Among the prelates who have taken part in the prayer services for Francis in recent weeks have been some of his most prominent critics, traditionalists Francis clashed with for their championing of old rites and ways of praying that he worried put too much distance between the faithful and the church.
On the first night of the rosary prayer on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica, Cardinal Raymond Burke of the United States, who has in the past suggested the pope was in danger of becoming a heretic, prayed quietly in the front row.
On Tuesday night, another prelate Francis exiled from power, Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, a former head of the church’s office on worship, left the evening prayers for Francis. He worked his rosary beads as he crossed St. Peter’s Square.
“I’m praying right now,” he said.
Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Venice, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.