There is something profoundly countercultural about prayer that is slow, deliberate, and shared.
In a world that fractures attention and rewards immediacy, the Pray with the Pope initiative invites us into a different posture altogether: one of attentiveness, solidarity, and hope. Each month, Pope Leo shares a specific prayer intention. January calls us to pray with the Word of God. Timely perhaps, have we put our Bibles on shelves somewhat and is it time to revisit these words more frequently than at Sunday Mass? The messages in Scripture remain deeply human and call us to pray for migrants, for the elderly, for families under strain, for those on the margins of society, for peace in places the news cycle has already moved past. And in doing so, he gently reminds us that prayer is never meant to be private insulation from the world’s pain, but a way of standing within it. It also calls us to actively seek the Word of God in our lives.
To pray with Pope Leo is not to outsource prayer to Rome, nor to align ourselves uncritically with institutional authority. Rather, it is to participate in a global act of listening, to allow the joys and sufferings of the world to interrupt our personal concerns, and to shape the horizon of our prayer. It is a reminder that Catholic prayer has always been catholic in the truest sense: universal, outward-facing, expansive.
There is also something quietly pastoral about this initiative. Pope Leo does not ask us to solve the world’s problems in prayer, nor to carry the unbearable weight of responsibility alone. He simply asks us to pray together. In naming an intention, he names a concern that might otherwise remain invisible, or feel too overwhelming to hold. Prayer, here, becomes an act of shared bearing, a way of saying, you are not alone, even when solutions feel distant or fragile.
From a theological perspective, this is deeply incarnational. The intentions are grounded in real bodies, real communities, real wounds. They echo the Gospel insistence that God is found not at a distance from human struggle, but within it. When we pray with Pope Leo for those who are excluded, forgotten, or fearful, we are drawn back to the God who pitches a tent among us, who listens before speaking, who accompanies rather than commands.
And perhaps this is where the initiative is most powerful: it forms us. Over time, praying monthly intentions shapes our moral imagination. It stretches our compassion beyond what is familiar. It teaches us to notice who is missing from our prayers, and why. In this way, Pray with the Pope is not simply a devotional exercise; it is a school of the heart.
In classrooms, staffrooms, kitchens, and quiet bedrooms, this shared prayer becomes a thread of communion, often unseen, but real nonetheless. It binds the local to the global, the personal to the political, the ordinary to the sacred. It reminds us that prayer is not an escape from responsibility, but one of the ways responsibility is lovingly sustained.
To pray with Pope Leo, then, is to practice hope. Not optimism. Hope. The kind that refuses to look away. The kind that believes God is already at work in the very places we are tempted to despair. The kind that trusts that even our small, imperfect prayers are gathered into something larger than ourselves.
And that, perhaps, is grace enough for now.
The Female Theologian 