The other day I heard of a priest, an actual ordained Catholic man of the cloth, who was exalting that he’d gotten somebody fired. He’d caused a married man with dependents to lose his job. How did he do it? The priest was crowing that he’d prayed a novena against his enemy, so that God would get him fired. Others chimed in that they’d been praying the Rosary for the same intention.
Let’s pretend that this person deserved his misfortune. I don’t think he did, I don’t think what happened to him was just, but pretend for a moment that he was horrible and evil and needed a good comeuppance.
Saying a novena– saying the same nine pre-set orations every day at a set time, in order to bring calamity on somebody else, doesn’t sound like prayer to me. Praying the Rosary– repeating the Most Holy name of Mary and Lord’s Prayer over and over for twenty minutes, daily, to bring suffering to an enemy, doesn’t sound like prayer. It sounds like black magic, like putting a hex on someone. I don’t know that witches ever really said the Lord’s Prayer backwards, but how is praying a Rosary to make a man suffer any different than a witch saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards to hex her neighbor?
Prayer is lifting the heart and mind to God. God is pure Love, Love Who desires that all mankind be fully alive, Love totally enthralled with the beauty of every human soul. I don’t care what sacred words you repeat, if you say them in order to harm someone, consciously and with malice aforethought, you are not lifting your mind to God. You’re not praying. You’re trying to drag God down into the confines of your mind.
The best thing I ever heard about those strange scary sisters at the Kindergarten, I didn’t hear from them. They’d probably be embarrassed to know that I knew. My father told me about it, confidentially, saying I shouldn’t talk about it at Kindergarten.
My father told me about an American woman of German heritage, who had defected to the Nazi side during World War Two; she broadcast English-language propaganda radio shows to demoralize the allies. After the war, she was arrested in Berlin and put on trial. She was in prison for her crimes until the 1960s, and in prison she repented and converted to Catholicism. But after her release, she had nowhere to go. There was no one who would hire a traitor who’d been in prison for defecting to the Nazis. There was no one who would give her a place to live.
Until the Sisters at the convent took her in.
The sisters who worked at the Kindergarten, the German sisters who my mother said had come fleeing Nazis, let a reformed Nazi live in the convent with them while they taught Kindergarten. She lived there for more than twenty years, until the day she died, just about a year before I came there.
Sister Mary Thomasina had works to back up her faith-filled admonition that you must not pray for your enemies’ ruin. I don’t have a work that noble to show off. I only have the testimony of the Church, taught to me through an eccentric Kindergarten teacher who I just found out died this past January. Pray for her; I can’t imagine she won’t pray for you. On her testimony, and on the testimony of One far greater: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. But pray also for those who annoy you, and those with whom you don’t get along, and for harmless people who don’t agree with your politics; you’ll run into them far more often. We are to pray without ceasing, and when you lift your voice to curse, you cease to pray.
What do we do, when we fold our hands? We don’t play or cook or wash the clothes; we mustn’t curse either. We pray.
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