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World at Prayer blog
Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
anxiety | family prayer | pray the rosary | self-help
If you’ve ever battled anxiety, you know it can feel like your brain is hijacked — spinning with thoughts you can’t seem to stop, flooded with emotions you didn’t invite. You may even feel like your body is working against you. But in the middle of all that chaos, the Rosary offers something astonishingly gentle and effective: peace. Not just a moment of calm, but real, neurological, heart-level peace. As a Catholic therapist, I’ve had the privilege of walking with many individuals through their struggles with anxiety. I’ve seen how combining faith and neuroscience can be powerfully healing, and the Rosary is a beautiful example of this integration. Here’s why the Rosary is not only spiritually beneficial, but also scientifically helpful for calming an anxious mind.
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Catholic Family Fun | Father Patrick Peyton | pray the rosary
Maria V. Gallagher recaps her own experience of using the new book, The Family That Prays Together Stays Together, to pray the Rosary. I’ll admit it — I had to be sold on the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary. I had been praying the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries since I was a child, pleading desperately that my father, an accountant, would be able to make payroll so that we could eat. I relied on that trio of Mysteries for consolation during difficult times. It was difficult for me to imagine branching off into praying a new set of Mysteries. But I realized that Pope John Paul II must have had good reason to add something to what I considered to be the perfect form of prayer. I had to trust in the Holy Father’s judgment on this. In The Family That Prays Together Stays Together, Father Willy Raymond, C.S.C, offers an incredibly helpful guide for praying the Luminous Mysteries, along with the other Mysteries of the Rosary. It was as if he and his spiritual guide, the late Father Patrick Peyton, took me by the hand, one on each side, and led me closer to Jesus through the recitation of these Mysteries of Light.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
Today's readings present a miraculous conception of two famous people in the history of the Israelite. These are Samson and John the Baptist. They carry similarity connected to their mission as announced by an Angel. They are both to be Nazirites from birth, abstaining from wine and strong drink, their mothers were barren initially and both have a mission of participating in the mission of God’s working among his people.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Immaculate Conception | Learn more about our faith
In difficult situations, dilemmas, quest between the truth and Charity sometimes we seek justification. We quickly identify the wrong, and the betrayal; we are cornered by pain. We seek relief by exposing that individual who has failed us. The world will clap for us! Pope Francis in his Apostolic letter Patris Cordis (With Father’s Love) says that often in life, things happen whose meaning we do not understand. Our first reaction is frequently one of disappointment and rebellion. "Joseph set aside his ideas in order to accept the course of events and, mysterious as they seemed, to embrace them, take responsibility for them and make them part of his history." — Patris Cordis, Apostolic letter by Pope Francis (150th anniversary of the proclamation of St. Joseph as patron of the universal church)
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Holy lives of inspiration | Immaculate Conception | Learn more about our faith
“We can draw strength, love and so many other blessings from our ancestors as we learn about them, practice gratitude for them, and perform sacred ordinances for them in the temple” If Only Our Ancestors Could Talk by Sheiyenne Baloo What has this got to do with the gospel reading today? We are presented with a genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, arranged into three neat sections of fourteen generations all connected to Abraham and David. What is it about all these generations of people named that should even attract our attention?
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Learn more about our faith | Strengthening family unity
Can you imagine finding out that your neighbor—the one everyone considered a bad person—made it into Heaven? Whatever emotions or questions that might stir up in us pale in comparison to the shock Jesus causes in today’s Gospel. In His parable of the man with two sons, Jesus compares the first son—the one who initially said “no” to his father but later changed his mind and did what was asked—to tax collectors and prostitutes. That alone would have been scandalous to His listeners. Tax collectors and prostitutes were considered the most shameful, the most morally corrupt, people of their time. Most believed they were beyond redemption—that the die had been cast, that they could not change. Like that imagined neighbor…or even someone closer to home.
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