Shifting Prayer Paradigms | March 22, 2026

Prayer is suddenly everywhere online, from polished apps to celebrity invitations to “join us” for a few minutes a day. Are we witnessing a genuine renewal of prayer, or are we simply more aware of it because the internet puts constant spiritual marketing in our pocket?

If we can learn to approach God together, maybe we can begin to hunger for the unity Christ desires, and avoid the shallow cycle of spiritual excitement that fades when the “sheen wears off.”

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Prayer Goes Mainstream Online

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm a senior Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish, and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. Isn't it amazing to note the current popularity of prayer? It's hard to go anywhere on the Internet without being reminded of an app or a website or a group that you can join for prayer. And that's not all. People talk about their participation in these offerings. They're more than advertisements, they're an active part of the spiritual life of our day and time. They're something to take note of. Now, all of this would have been a dream for Catholics in the 40s and 50s, as many prayer leaders were trying to motivate their audiences to reach out to the rest of the world. There was a more intact sense of the life of the Church then in all denominations and across most demographics, but the ease of interconnection we enjoy was lost to them. Father Peyton had his Rosary Crusade, and Bishop Sheen eventually came on the air with his programs, and there were other smaller leaders with varied audiences, including our own Monsignor Waldy from here in Oklahoma City, who it is said was the first priest in the U.S. to have a program on the radio. And they made substantial gains in the public public at large, but who they were able to appeal to in the eyes they were able to appear in front of is dwarfed by the power of communication in our day and time. It's amazing. To get a sense of the scale, just consider the reach of Catholic Radio here in Oklahoma. Before the founding of the Catholic Radio Committee, I had a program on the radio in Spanish. It was an hour a week, which I recorded on cassette and then mailed to six radio stations around the state. The program played intermittently on those stations and on Saturday morning here in Oklahoma City when it was aired next to other programs, alas, that were in English. It was better than nothing, but only just barely. Now, of course, Catholic programming covers the state 24 hours a day on a dozen stations. It's beyond anything anyone could have imagined all those years ago when I first dipped to my toe into the radio medium. And I'm generally in favor of the invitation to pray and all those who want to join and pray together. Of course, I pay attention to the apps that I have, the apps that I have, with the general Catholic backgrounds and vocabulary, because I feel the most comfortable there among those kinds of apps, and because they're advertised in Catholic media. I gravitate to them because I feel like I can trust them in their message. But if it were a network of those who are not Catholic and they were sincere and true, I'd have no objection to what they were offering. Praying together as a people of God is one of the gifts of the Spirit, and one of the gifts that we can offer to the world. When I hear the advertisement to join these people in prayer, I feel drawn to them. I've mentioned before one of the experiences I had about prayer that moved me so deeply during the beatification mass of Blessed Stanley Rother in 2017. Not only was it moving, it created a real sense of longing in my heart that still dwells there. It was when we were all gathered in the great arena and the Mass was beginning. The thousands upon thousands of us had come in and found our places. Most of us were feeling lucky that we could make it in at all, since there were so many more people than had been anticipated, and only those who had come early and stood in line were going to be a part of the Mass live. But as Mass began with the rousing music from the choir, we settled into the ordinary routine we all know. Cardinal Amato invited us to remember the Lord's forgiveness, and together we prayed the confidir. It was all of those voices together as we repeated the words we knew in English and Spanish and Vietnamese, all of us, confessing our sinfulness and our need for the Lord's presence and forgiveness in our lives. It was a moving moment. It brought goosebumps to me. At that moment I thought, wouldn't it be incredible if all believers all over the world were able to pray this prayer together just as we're praying it now, today? And we were praying it not because it was forced, or because we were learning something new, or because we were making some space in our worship for something strange from the outside, but because it comes from the heart and it's part of who we are and what we do. It's not just because the words are in common and make up a common heritage, but because they are part of the life of the faith and the practice of the faith that we all share together. It's the sharing, the common life together, the unconscious brotherhood we share as we confess our needs together that make it all so powerful. If only it could be so, we could be together. If only we could stand as one church, the one people of God, one family of faith gathered as one, that would be a power almost impossible to ignore. It was powerful beyond my expectation and experience when there were 17,000 of us gathered together praying. Can you imagine what a billion of us together would be like? That we have apps and networks and opportunities contribute to helping us fulfill this goal. Of course, we should mention that when we say Mass on Sunday, we're all gathered as Catholics together as one church, and we all say the same prayers together, repeating in the same way and at the same time the same belief and practice. We tend not to pay too much attention to that fact. It's been much more the case in recent generations to focus on what issues and practices divide the church rather than on that which keeps it together. But the fact of our liturgy and its power to hold us together should never be minimized. While it's not quite the same as having 17,000 voices all at once, who are gathered for the same reason and focused with attention and purpose, but it is a remarkable fact of our being together as God's church. I've had the opportunity to celebrate Mass all over the world, and I can testify to the power of our prayer together. Whether the prayers are in Punjabi, Telugu, Estonian, or Hungarian, they sound as powerfully and as meaningfully as when they are prayed in the English of my heart, when they are prayed together as one church. Standing with the people of Santiago Atitlan as they repeat their prayers is an experience I've had dozens of times. Knowing they're praying in the same sanctuary and come to the same altar as Father Rother always fills me with the joy of the faith. We are separated by language and history, but we are one in Christ when we can pray together. But we're not all together as believers. That fact grows more and more tragic as we pass through the years. The fracturing of the church, powerfully at work as we began the 20th century, shows no sign of slowing down. At the beginning of the 21st century, it has begun to pick up even more speed. With the power of the Internet, it's possible to gather people and fracture them even more thoroughly than before. After all, anyone with a camera and a pulpit or a stage and a microphone can make a claim for himself as the center of the church and claim a presence and a purpose counter to the whole church itself. As he does, the church is fractured and divided and pummeled even more than before. What began at the beginning of the modern era in the Reformation as an attempt to get church right has resulted in the postmodern era in the near eradication of the existence of any church at all, beyond the bounds of a few chairs and a couple of hymn books. This has exacted an enormous price in the world as we face the challenges of being Christian in our time. I've mentioned this before, but a couple of movies bear out this movement. In the movies God is not dead and Heaven is for real, both created and produced by Christian filmmakers, they give to us the images of what a church should look like in our day. In older films and TV programs, a church was a place with an altar or a sanctuary of some kind, centered with a cross or a crucifix with a pulpit next to it. When preaching, the pulpit was occupied by a minister in a gown or a priest in his vestments. Currently, however, the place where Christians gather is a stage, with nothing built on it. Preaching takes place by someone dressed in casual wear, surrounded by the microphones of the band. In these movies, this is presented as the norm for Christian worship. From staid, solid, regular, and institutional, Christian presence has moved to what is temporary, extemporaneous, provisional, and indefinite. It's the process of fractioning in motion. To be fractured is a much more, is a much bigger and a more poignant challenge than that we don't say the same prayers together. The effect is much the same as when we give up, as what we give up when we don't have the full throated voice together, like on the day of the beatification. The power surging through the crowd of us gathered was palpable. All of us could feel it. And that was just because we were saying the same prayer together. What would be the case if we could all speak as one voice as we faced the issues of our day and time together? What would the world look like then? It certainly looked different. Remember the old newsreels of the Nazi gatherings that have appeared a thousand times on YouTube? The banners are hung, the dase is arranged and set in arco deco elegance, and the crowd comes in, led by men in uniform as they fill up the floor of the stadium. It is an immense gathered throng who've come to celebrate the promise of a new German future. With one voice they shout and affirm and cheer. It's all amazing to watch, even ninety years later. The whole thing from opening credits to final words was choreographed to highlight the power of the people together. They were one. But the churches, they were not one. Everyone spoke from his own pulpit and with his own message. No one could speak as the church for all of Germany. The Catholics could speak, the Catholic voice. Protestants could speak as Protestants, and they from different perspectives and points of view. But there was no unity in the words from the churches. The answer was not a counter demonstration, filling up a competing stadium. But if they could have spoken, responded with one voice, it would have been different. The churches were hobbled by their divisions. This played into the hands of those whose message of unity was so powerful and so powerfully seen. What would the future have been had it been possible for the church to speak full throated and in unison? The invitation to pray together is one attempt to begin to answer this conundrum. If it's not possible to get Christians to stand together in what they believe or what they can profess together, then it might be possible for us to be able at least to address God together. That's the thinking behind these apps. And it's a good effort. Frankly, I can't think of a better one. If we can all agree that we are sons and daughters of God, that God hears our prayers and that we should stand and that we all stand in need before the divine, then we could approach God together as the needs we with the needs that we share in common. At least we could do that together, come together and pray. It's a small step. Perhaps it can grow into a larger one. That's always been the general agenda for the Ministerial Alliance that is usually so active in the small towns here in Oklahoma. It doesn't work with much effectiveness in Oklahoma City, but in small towns, in my experience, the ministers get together and put together a prayer service where they can invite all of their people to come and be apart. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and graduation, those are the times when the ministers can safely invite their flocks and enjoy the opportunity to be around one another and enjoy the chance to address God together. Beyond that, it's not usually possible to get the various groups together. I mostly enjoyed it, the Ministerial Alliance that I was a part of. This is what the Praying Together app offers. All of us share common concerns. They are especially pointed at the times of the year when our major celebrations come about. It's only natural that we can focus our needs and our cries to God as we become more and more aware of them in the signal times of the year. All year long we live with our needs, of course. Our hearts cry out loudly throughout the sum of our lives, which is why the apps go on to offer us a chance to get started at those signal times of the year when we're paying attention and then to continue. It's clever marketing to invite people to a season or to a time, especially when it is one we all recognize and respond to. I don't mind that part of the appeal is that we can pray along with celebrities. These notable men and women have just as much right to claim their place in the household of God as anyone else. Why shouldn't we be invited to take part in their life of faith as well? It's a natural and effective appeal. And they're not claiming that responding to the invitation to prayer will make a person a celebrity or become the pathway to notoriety. We all know we're more likely to respond to a powerful ask than to a weak one. If asked, we can say yes or no equally, no matter who's doing the asking. So have we turned a corner in our world when these notable public opportunities to pray? Is there a new age being born among us with spirituality in the air? Or are we being misled by the ubiquity of the Internet? I mean, since it's so easy to see what we haven't seen before, maybe we just notice more than we used to, rather than this being a more spiritual time than in the past. Like Father Paul Mollins said when he first bought a computer and got an email account, he said, I had no idea that there would be so many dysfunctions that medicine could cure. He hadn't been marketed to as effectively or and as intensely as he was until he hooked his computer up. Maybe all things are like that with the prayer apps. Maybe we're just being saturated because we spend more time on our screens and on our personal accounts than we ever did before. It's hard to say, of course, that people in the middle of a new age being born never know any never know that they are. Everything looks more or less the same from day to day. We only know that we know and we can't know more than that. Whether this public focus on prayer presages something new or is only one more attempt with the same stifling result is still to be seen. And whether we make a hullabaloo about prayer, prompting an intense prompted by internal by internet marketing is worthwhile, it waits on the verge on the verdict of history. It's all still too soon to tell. But I hope it does t it does matter, it does tell. I hope lots of people join and have an experience of being able to pray with one another and be able to draw out of the solace from their being together in prayer and the pursuit of God's will. Down deep there's also for me the hope that if we can begin to draw together in prayer, then we can begin to hunger for the end for the unity that should be our heritage. In the long run, if this is successful and fruitful, I think the first stop is such an endeavor to be that that that the final stop in such an endeavor will be the Catholic Church. I don't say that because I imagine everyone has designed these programs with some clever Jesuitical end game in mind, snagging sincere people to become members of the true church. No, I think the final step in this effort is obvious, because it is in fact the final step. In the development of the life of the church, it was shaped by its commitment to prayer and holiness. Those who want to enter a life of prayer and holiness will either create the structures and practices the church created or will find what they're looking for already present in the church. When they do that, both the searchers and the church will be enriched. This was in this uh it brings to mind a comment I heard once from Father Joe Ross when he was the associate pastor at St. Joe's in Norman and the campus chaplain at OU. This was in the middle 1970s. In those days, there was a lot of attention paid to making Mass more accessible and more understandable for those who came. Plus, it was a time in which everyone bent over backwards to make all those who were not Catholic feel at home if ever they came to church. The formal nature of the liturgy, many said, kept people from feeling at ease, from experiencing the opportunity and the movement of the Spirit as they gathered. Mass was, in their minds, too rigid and too formal to be inviting. They described this as the problem to be solved. Father Ross invited them to think of a way that could come up together, they could put together a way to worship that would be spontaneous as well as inviting. So he said, Come up with us, come up with a way that all of us together could worship, so that we can all be together and at ease with one another. So they got to work. They decided there had to be some general welcome to everything. There had to be a time when everyone was when everyone understood what they what they were there for, so that they were so that what was going to happen could be explainable and obvious. There had to be scripture readings. People should also have a chance to pray for one another and their needs, and then there was the Eucharist to celebrate. After all, Jesus said that we should do this when we gather in his name. Finally, there should be a summary, a sort of dismissal of everyone who is over forty. After lots of discussion and after all, Jesus said we should do this when we gather in his name, and it should be a summary, a sort of dismissal of everyone who came. After lots of discussion and thought, they brought this to Father Ross. He looked it over and then commented, I don't know if you notice, but you've just reinvented mass. Everything you want to happen happens at Mass. Of course it does. That's what I think is the eventual destination for a lot of those who pause long enough to become committed to prayer and to the spiritual journey. If we become serious about the work of God and the world and the history of God's initiative with us, then we'll eventually find our way, if we remain in common prayer with one another, to the church. That is, if we remain firm and faithful. It's a large if, of course. The alternative is that we engage in prayer for a while. It intrigues and captivates us just long enough for us to enjoy it and to stay with it. But as in all things, there are ups and downs. It's not unusual that the sheen wears off, and when it does, the initial excitement dims and then disappears. In this we could take a lesson from the spiritual master, Saint John of the Cross, who said that when we begin in prayer and draw cross to the Lord, he showers us with his gifts. Then the gifts are withdrawn to see whether we love the Lord or just the gifts he gives. That's the other outcome. There's nothing unusual in this. It happens in every part of our lives, from friendship and marriage to sports and work. The only real downside is that a slight brush of interest in the work of the Lord, leading to initial excitement that soon passes, is like a slight infection that we get over, creating lifelong immunity. Making the exposure to this relationship more popular and easier could make for more immunity. That's always the chance that's taken. But we have to be aware that we all come together, and that we can come together is not a foregone conclusion. The churches are divided for a reason that are not insubstantial or easily reconciled. Putting aside differences isn't easily done. The more we can pray together, the more we can bring our lives into conformity with God's will, that's what's important. But it doesn't take long before our pursuit of God's will as a people together bumps up against the different ways we understand one another and the many ways we've gone about doing His will. We can be sincere about wanting to be with one another and direct our prayers to the fullness of God's goodness, but we soon run into the various hard stops that are part of our human nature. Then it's easy to fall out in disagreement. The only recourse is to trust the moving of the Spirit and try not to stand in the way. Perhaps now is the moment when minds can be opened and personalities softened. It may be the case that the celebrities who sincerely call us to prayer can become models of pliant, faithful people who could bring the extremes together as one. It may even be the case that they can do this because they're not clergymen and don't speak formally for the church. Over the course of time, the Spirit has been unimaginably clever in those who can be helpful to the work of God in the world. At the end of the twelfth century, the Spirit moved Francis, a product of the complicated martial world of Assisi, to become a model for Engaged believers all over Italy. His example continues to inspire men and women all over the world, even today. Francis was overcome by the realization of God's goodness and mercy, especially spilling out of the lives of the poor. He stood in the marketplace of his town and pronounced his readiness to follow God's will as best as he could seek it. If he were living today, no bout, no doubt he'd be on the internet. And who knows? Perhaps he is. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called The Buds Decorate the Trees. The buds decorate the barren trees as if confetti froze upon the limbs before floating to the ground. Spring surprises in great measure, we see the promises boating upstream, more sight than sound. But so it is in the change of seasons when the tilting earth turns, display its shadows crooked again, and the range of nature, beyond easy reason, joins the lilting song of the planets as they play on the rattled wind. To bring us beauty, gilding our trees and drifting our beds with flowers, fecundity on display, flagrant and fair. As we look, we marvel all buildings as we all building, as we, lifting our eyes to eternal bowers, see God's power arrayed in fulsome care. That's the buds decorate the trees. So now is the time to begin to make the plans to celebrate Holy Week and Easter. Be sure to be able to make contact with your parish about the times and uh places for all of the activities of Holy Week, most especially for the Easter vigil that normally takes place at a specified and different time on Saturday evening. So it's important to do that to be prepared so that this uh e season of celebration might culminate in the most fruitful possible way. I hope in the weeks to come you can continue to join us as we can as we continue exploring Living Catholic.

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Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.