Beginning a new year brings me to reflect more poignantly on the reason for prayer in my life and what it's all about. These words are helpful to me and perhaps to you:
Our praying can and should arise above all from our heart, from our needs, our hopes, our joys, our sufferings, from our shame over sin, and from our gratitude for the good. It can and should be wholly personal prayer. But we also constantly need to make use of those prayers that express in words the encounter with God experienced both by the Church as a whole and by individual members of the Church. For without these aids to prayer, our own praying and our image of God becomes subjective and end up reflecting ourselves more than the living God.Pope Benedict XVIJesus of Nazareth
To that end, I hope the prayer intentions of the Pope posted here on the first day of each month are a means to keep ourselves attentive to what the Pope mentions above: on our own true humanity, on God and on brothers and sisters around the world. Let us daily keep each other in prayer, especially when we pray the Sacrifice of the Mass, the Divine Office and/or the Rosary. No greater service can we offer for another and for the whole world than to offer a sacrifice of prayer to God, particularly at the altar.
The general intention
That young people may learn to use modern means of social communication for their personal growth and to better prepare themselves to serve society.
The mission intention
That every believer in Christ may be conscious that unity among all Christians is a condition for more effective proclamation of the Gospel.
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