Pope Francis reflected at the General Audience this Wednesday, June 19, on the Psalms, “a symphony of prayer in the Bible.”
Below is the complete catechesis of the Holy Father:
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Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
In preparation for the next Jubilee, I have invited you to dedicate the year 2024 “to a great “symphony” of prayer.” With today’s catechesis I would like to remind you that the Church already has a symphony of prayer whose composer is the Holy Spirit, and it is the Book of Psalms.
As in every symphony, there are several “movements” in it, that is, several types of prayer: praise, thanksgiving, supplication, lament, narration, wisdom reflection and others, both in personal form and in choral form of the entire town. These are the songs that the Spirit Himself has placed on the lips of the Bride, her Church. All the books of the Bible, as I mentioned last time, are inspired by the Holy Spirit, but the Book of Psalms is also inspired in the sense that it is full of poetic inspiration.
The psalms have occupied a privileged place in the New Testament. In fact, there have been, and continue to be, editions containing the New Testament and the Psalms. On my desk, I have a Ukrainian edition of this New Testament and the Psalms, by a soldier who died in war, who was sent to me. And he prayed in front with this book.
Not all psalms – and not everything in each psalm – can be repeated and made their own by Christians and even less so by modern human beings. They sometimes reflect a historical situation and a religious mentality that are no longer ours. This does not mean that they are not inspired, but that in certain respects they are tied to a time and a provisional stage of revelation, as is also the case with much ancient legislation.
What most recommends the psalms to our reception is that they were the prayer of Jesus, of Mary, of the Apostles and of all the Christian generations that preceded us. When we recite them, God listens to them with that great “orchestration” that is the communion of saints. Jesus, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, enters the world with a psalm verse in his heart: “Behold, I come, O God, to do your will” (cf. Heb 10:7; Ps 40:9); and he leaves the world, according to the Gospel of Luke, with another verse on his lips: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46; cf. Ps 31:6).
The use of the psalms in the New Testament is followed by that of the Fathers and the entire Church, which makes them a fixed element in the celebration of the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours. “All the divine Holy Scripture exudes the goodness of God – writes Saint Ambrose –, but above all the sweet book of the psalms does so.”
The sweet book of psalms. And I wonder: Do you ever pray with the psalms? Grab the Bible or the New Testament and pray a psalm. For example, when you are a little sad about having sinned, pray Psalm 50. And there are so many psalms that help us move forward. Get into the habit of praying with the psalms, I assure you that you will be happy in the end.
But we cannot only live from the legacy of the past: it is necessary that we make the psalms our prayer. It has been written that, in a sense, we must become “authors” of the psalms ourselves, making them our own and praying with them. If there are some psalms, or simply verses, that speak to our hearts, it is good to repeat them and pray them during the day.
The psalms are prayers “for all seasons”: there is no mood or need that does not find in them the best words to turn into prayer. Unlike all other prayers, the psalms do not lose their effectiveness through repetition; On the contrary, they increase it. Because? Because they are inspired by God and “breath out” God, every time they are read with faith.
If we feel oppressed by remorse and guilt, we can repeat with David: “Have mercy on me, O God, in your love; / in your great mercy” (Sal 51.3). If we want to express a strong personal bond with God, we say: “O God, you are my God, / from the dawn I seek you, / my soul thirsts for you, / my flesh longs for you / in a dry, thirsty and thirsty land.” water” (Sal 63,2).
It is not by chance that the Liturgy has included this psalm in the lauds on Sundays and solemnities. And if fear and anguish assail us, these wonderful words come to our rescue: “The Lord is my shepherd (…). Even though he passes through a dark valley, / I fear no evil” (Ps 23:1.4). The psalms allow us not to impoverish our prayer by reducing it only to requests, to a continuous “give me, give us…”. We learn from the Lord’s Prayer, which before asking for “our daily bread” says: “Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done.”
The psalms help us open ourselves to a less self-centered prayer: a prayer of praise, of blessing, of thanksgiving; and they also help us to become the voice of all creation, making it a participant in our praise. Brothers and sisters, may the Holy Spirit, who gave the Bride Church the words to pray to her divine Spouse, help us to make them resonate today in the Church today and to make this preparatory year for the Jubilee a symphony of prayer. Thank you
Pope Francisco
Pope Francis, born on December 17, 1936 in Buenos Aires (Argentina), is the first Latin American Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, assuming the papacy on March 13, 2013. His approachable style and his emphasis on mercy They have left a distinctive mark on his pontificate.