Praying the psalms with Blessed John Paul II
Recently we have recalled the pilgrimage to the Italian city of peace, Assisi, which Pope John Paul II celebrated twenty-five years ago when He and World Religious leaders set out from Vatican City Station in prayerful pilgrimage for peace and understanding. It is might also be worthwhile to remember that other, spiritual, pilgrimage that he made to Jerusalem, the City of Peace, through the prayerful catechesis he offered the Church in the ongoing reflection upon the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours.
These reflections provided the basis for the catechesis at the weekly General Audience in the latter years of the Pontificate of the now Blessed John Paul II. Furthermore, this series of reflections has been continued by Pope Benedict XVI, both shortly after his election and even in more recent times. We hear the words of the Blessed John Paul II as he commenced this catechesis: “in this way I would like to encourage and help everyone to pray with the same words that Jesus used, words that for thousands of years have been part of the prayer of Israel and the Church.”(General Audience: 28 March, 2001) Here he returned to a hope expressed earlier in the Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio ineunte, n.32: ‘that the Church would become more distinguished in the art of prayer, learning it ever anew from the lips of the Divine Master’. Here we have but to recall how the risen Lord would open the minds and hearts of his disciples to all that referred to Him in the scriptures and “in the psalms”(Luke 24:45). Moreover the disciples remembered that Jesus ‘did & said these things’ and that therein the words of the psalms were fulfilled. (Jn.2: 17;cf ps.68) Moreover, it remained the conviction of the early Church that in the psalms it was Christ who was addressed or, at other times, that it was Christ who prayed the psalms, in the sense that the