What is the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network?

The Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network is a worldwide prayer network responding to the challenges that confront humanity and the Church’s mission as expressed in the Pope’s monthly intentions. In praying with these intentions, we extend our gaze onto the whole world and enter personally into the joys and hopes, the pains and sufferings of our brothers and sisters everywhere.

An intention is the will and determination to act. The Pope’s intentions, the challenges to humanity and the mission of the Church, express will and determination to act. They seek to expand the worldwide network of prayer and mobilize people to build a world where human values prevail together with those Jesus embodied in the Gospel. The World Prayer Network opens each month with a WORLD DAY OF PRAYER for new intentions. During all the days of that month, prayer puts the world in motion. “We pray together and we put action to our prayers. We give sense and purpose to our days.”

The intentions of each month are keys to live our faith in daily life, joining action to our prayers. Each intention presents to us a challenge that gives PURPOSE to the month. We begin every morning by making a daily offering. This prayer makes us conscious of our call to apostolic courage so that we can take responsibility for our words and actions. Ask God to grace, we assume the task ahead of us. We find in the intentions, Pope Francis’ challenges to humanity, a spiritual path for our days.

The prayer intentions of the Pope expressing the challenges of our world move people to action. The intentions are not just intellectual ideas or mere words. They are calls to concrete action in the here and now, actions taken together. Because true spiritual growth is never isolated or individual, we pray together on the first Friday of each month. We pray together as a network of people from all continents and cultures for the challenges of the world.

The source and model for this readiness is Jesus Christ given to us and for us, constantly making himself present to us in the Eucharist. Receiving his life leads us, in gratitude, to offer our own lives daily to the Father. Which the Church offers to all Christians to help them to be friends and apostles of the Risen Jesus in their daily lives, and awakens the missionary zeal. It leads them to a covenant of personal love, symbolized by his Heart. The PWPN invites us to live with an inner attitude of apostolic readiness that is the fruit of love. It must come from a personal and intimate relationship with the Crucified and Risen Lord where I find myself loved and I offer my availability as a loving response. The PWPN invites us to live a Eucharistic life. In the Eucharist we encounter Jesus giving out his life for us, supreme source and inspiration for our apostolic readiness. When we celebrate the Eucharistic memorial we unite ourselves in a privileged way to Jesus, for we celebrate the Father’s initiative to join our history to his own history in order to heal us. The encounter with Jesus reconciles us, frees us from the bonds that constrain us, and makes us capable of offering our lives to the service of his mission. The PWPN invites us to join a worldwide network in which millions pray with the Pope for the challenges he points out to us in his monthly prayer intentions. These prayer intentions open us to the urgent needs of the Church and humanity. They lead us to commit our lives in favor of the justice of the Kingdom, in resonance with the theme of the monthly intention. The PWPN invites us also to collaborate with all who work for greater brotherhood and justice, even those from other religious traditions. The PWPN as a Church service entrusted by the Holy Father to the Society of Jesus is commended to spread these intentions, even while it remains a school of prayer and intercession, for the challenges for humanity.

To help us be ever more available to the mission of the Risen Lord, even in small, everyday matters, the PWPN invites us to follow some spiritual practices and a school of formation we have called A way of the heart(see below). These practices open us to the Holy Spirit who works towards uniting our life and our heart to the life and heart of Jesus. They invite us to offer to the Father, together with Jesus, simply but radically, all that we are and possess. See Path of the heart