Hi, everyone! It’s Angel again. My dad asked me to thank you for reading our bulletin series on prayer. He says that he wants to thank you & that he hopes & prays that you’ve gotten something out of it that has helped you on your spiritual journey. He also wants to thank you because our last form of the 5 forms of Catholic prayer is prayers of thanksgiving.

When we engage in prayers of praise we are praising God for who & what He is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph #2639 says that praise, "lauds God for his own sake and gives him glory, quite beyond what he does, but simply because HE IS. It shares in the blessed happiness of the pure of heart who love God in faith before seeing him in glory.”

Prayers of petition are very similar to the prayers of intercession that we looked at last week, with one difference, their focus. While in prayers of intercession we are interceding for the needs of others, when we pray prayers of petition, we are bringing, not the needs of others, but our own needs before God. We intercede for others, we petition for ourselves, I guess that you could say. 

This weekend, we continue our look at the different forms of prayer by looking at prayers of intercession. My guess that this is one of the most familiar prayers that many of us pray. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that, “Intercession is a prayer of petition which leads us to pray as Jesus did,” (2634). Praying for the living and the dead is also a spiritual work of mercy. We offer prayers of intercession every day and every week at Mass.