The “Our Father” - Cardinal Bacci

The “Our Father”

1. Our Lord exhorted His disciples on many occasions to pray often and with confidence if they wished to be heard. Everything which they asked His heavenly Father in His name, He said, they would obtain. Ask, He said, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find, knock, and it shall be opened to you. Finally, He insisted that we ought to pray and never to give up. In other words, life can be a continuous prayer if we offer to God all our thoughts, words, and actions.

The ideal Christian prayer is to do the will of God at all times from the motive of pure love. The Apostles, however, who had not made that much progress in the spiritual life, asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. (Luke 11:1) It was then that Our Lord composed the most beautiful of prayers, the “Our Father.” (Mt. 6:9-13) When we recite it, we speak to God in the words of Jesus Christ Himself and unite our weak voices with the powerful voice of the Son of God. We address the Eternal God, moreover, by the name of Father. Even in the Old Testament God is often referred to in this way. Then, however, He figured as the Father of the chosen people, whereas now He is the Father of all. He is our Father, the Father of all mankind and of all races, whom He has willed to redeem from the slavery of sin. The term “Our Father” has taken on a new and fuller meaning. Our weak prayer becomes united to that of Jesus, our first-born brother, and to the prayers of the Apostles, Martyrs, Virgins, and Confessors, who form and have formed throughout the centuries the Mystical Body of Christ which is the Church. We need no longer feel that we are on our own, for through the Communion of Saints our entreaties are joined to those of the entire Church, militant, suffering, and triumphant. We can be confident, therefore, that our prayer will be heard.

2. “Our Father, Who art in Heaven.” Heaven is God Himself, Who reveals Himself to the souls of the blessed. If a man lives in God, his mind and heart are already in Heaven, even though he is still an exile upon this earth. It is a wonderful experience to lead a bodily existence upon earth while our minds are with God in heaven, for, as St. Paul says, “our citizenship is in heaven.” (Phil. 3:20) As we are aware, God is everywhere, in Heaven and on earth. When we invoke our Father Who is in Heaven, however, we manifest our faith in Him and in His generosity, whereby He reveals Himself in all His glory to the blessed and shows His mercy to us poor exiles when we come to Him. In the first words of the Pater Noster, we express not only our faith, but also our hope of being happy with God for all eternity.

3. God is truly our Father because He created us from nothing and because He caused us to be born again through the Incarnation of His only-begotten Son and the work of the Redemption. In this way He is doubly our Father.

Can we claim, however, to be true sons of God? It is not enough simply to make this claim by reciting the “Our Father,” but we should prove it in a practical way in our daily lives. We can do this by accepting God’s will in all things, by obeying His commandments and the precepts of the church, and especially by loving Him more than anything in creation.