Prayer & Virtue

A Redemptorist's short book on why your prayers go unheard, and a Jesuit's long one on the daily habits that get them heard.

Fr. Girardey wrote for the person who keeps asking and gets nothing. He holds Christ to the promise that whoever asks will receive, so the fault must be on our side, and he finds it in a sin we mean to keep, a request that would do us harm, or prayer said in a hurry and dropped after a few days. Even the saints, he notes, asked for patience for decades before they had it.

Bellecius picks up at the hurried prayer. His tepid man rushes through his prayers to be rid of them and does not recognize himself in the description. His remedy is a routine. Fix tomorrow's rising hour before you sleep, meditate every morning, read a quarter hour, and at noon and at night make the particular examen to check on the morning's resolution. Girardey says God helps the man who does his share. Bellecius says what the share is.

They even share a verse, the psalmist whose heart withered because he forgot to eat his bread. Girardey uses it for the soul that never reflects, Bellecius for the one that skips its meditation. Read Girardey first. Bellecius is for the months after, a chapter and a self-examination at a time.

What you get

Two EPUB files, delivered by download, with a ZIP of both: Prayer: Its Necessity, Its Power, Its Conditions by Fr. Ferreol Girardey, C.SS.R., set from the 1920 printing of the 1916 B. Herder edition, and Solid Virtue by Fr. Aloysius Bellecius, S.J., set from the eighth edition of 1914, in the Ursuline translation with Archbishop Croke's preface.