Why the Liturgy Is the School of Prayer

Ask most Catholics how they pray and they will name a devotion: the rosary, a novena, the Divine Mercy chapel. All good. But before any of these, the Church places something older and stranger: the liturgy itself, the Mass, the official public prayer of the Body of Christ.

When we pray the liturgy, we never pray alone. The psalms we recite are being recited at that same hour on every continent; the words of consecration have been spoken by millions of hands over two thousand years. The liturgy is the school where the Church teaches her own grammar of prayer — adoration, thanksgiving, petition, sorrow — in their proper order and proportion.

This is why the Church counsels those who feel dry in private prayer to return to the Mass. Devotions are rivers; the liturgy is the water table beneath them. A Catholic steeped in the liturgical year — Advent's longing, Lent's hunger, Easter's overflow — learns to pray with the seasons of the soul rather than the moods of the week.

Sit with the Sunday Mass texts this week. Read the collect before you arrive. Let the Church's ancient words set your own.