Monthly Prayer: May 2025

This month's reflection has been written by Father David Stewart SJ

The infinite creator, God, speaks to us and chooses to come to us in and through created realities, pre-eminently through human lives. As we continue to mourn our beloved Pope Francis, we have all been reflecting on how his most human of lives touched so many people, as often as not challenging us too, always bearing the imprint of God’s voice – and God’s mercy. Often he referred to himself as a sinner, adopting for his personal motto the Latin phrase, “miserando atque eligendo”, by which the then Archbishop Bergoglio associated himself with Jesus’ merciful call of Matthew the tax-collector ((Mt.9:9-13) cited in a sermon of Bede) – a sinner shown mercy and chosen. On the last of his frequent visits to Rome’s prisons, days before his death, he was heard to say that he should be serving a sentence, not the inmates. And he always asked people to pray for him. 

When God speaks, one response we can make among many is to use our everyday experience to praise and thank God. And that extends to time itself. We can sanctify each day with the “Hours”, the Prayer of the Church or Divine Office, or more simply, by a morning offering prayer at the start of each day. Towards the end of the day, we can spend a few reflective moments letting the Holy Spirit show us the real meaning of the day just ending. That’s asking the Holy Spirit to show us our day as God sees it, which is probably not how we saw it! 

Then we mark days, months and years, using the time that we live in to give glory to God. We have the calendar of feast-days, memorials and solemnities; we have, of course, also the seasons such as Advent, Lent, Eastertide. A rich Catholic tradition is how certain months, too, are designated for a particular aspect of God’s work for us. May as Mary’s month is, perhaps the best-known (and probably the most beloved) of these special months of devotion. How wonderfully appropriate for us now as we recall Pope Francis’s devotion to Our Lady “Undoer of Knots” and to her as “Salus Populi Romani”, displaying that icon in a rainy, windswept St. Peter's Square during his extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing, praying for the whole world at the height of the pandemic. That icon is found in St. Mary Major’s, the Papal Basilica where Francis always prayed before and after each of his apostolic journeys, which took him to 68 countries. This is where, at his request, he was buried on Saturday April 26th.  

We commemorate significant past events, too, on anniversaries, decades and centenaries. This year, we mark the 60th anniversary of SCIAF’s foundation; grateful for those first good people who followed the Holy Spirit’s prompting and, knowing that no follower of Christ could ignore poverty and injustice in other parts of the world that we all call our common home, dedicated themselves to do something about it. 

Pope Francis was steadfast in his condemnation of injustice and instances of self-centred policy, while reminding us, again and again, that God’s mercy shone most brightly among those on the peripheries rather than the corridors of power. 

Ten years ago, the world gasped when Pope Francis released Laudato Si, his landmark encyclical on our Common Home, calling for “a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all” (LS14).  Pope Francis underlined the principles of Integral Human Development, chiefly that our care for each other mirrors and echoes our care, or the lack of it, of our Common Home,  That vision, expressed as SCIAF’s desire for “a just world, free of poverty, where we flourish and live in harmony with each other and all creation,” is what we all support, as SCIAF friends and supporters. 

At this time, we thank the Lord for speaking to us and coming to us through the life of Pope Francis. Surely the best way of expressing our gratitude is to continue what he encouraged, so warmly yet firmly, as “Missionary Disciples”, called, chosen and bearing God’s mercy, as our beloved late Pope knew that he was.