Adoration and the Struggle of Prayer

Surely one sign of hope of Eucharistic revival is the ever-increasing interest among U.S. Catholics in the practice and theology of Eucharistic adoration.¹ While it is difficult to gauge exactly the popularity of Eucharistic adoration, by the best estimates over 8500 churches in the United States offer some times of Eucharistic adoration, and over 800 of those sites offer perpetual adoration.² Why the contemporary interest in Eucharistic adoration? There are many and various suggestions. Saint John Paul II consistently linked Vatican II and contemporary interest in adoration, writing that “the encouragement and deepening of eucharistic worship are proofs of that authentic renewal which the [Second Vatican] council set itself as an aim and of which they are the central point.”³ Father Benedict Groeschel proposed the modern epidemic of loneliness as one of the driving forces behind the popularity of adoration — people are hungry to simply be in the presence of another, above all, in the presence of their God.⁴ Cardinal Robert Sarah would suggest that there’s a link between the noisiness of our world and peoples’ desire for the silence of adoration.⁵ Recently, Fr. Carter Griffin put forward the idea that “adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is so popular today . . . because it is a powerful counterweight to a visually coarse culture. Our Lord exposed on the altar, reigning in peace and humility, is a calm antidote to the tantalizing images that can entice us.”⁶ Although these theories diverge, they do not contradict each other, and they all take contemporary interest in adoration as a given.

I do not intend to argue for the primacy of one cause motivating contemporary interest in Eucharistic adoration. What I intend to do, rather, is to examine the link between Eucharistic adoration and another constant concern for the Church’s ministers — teaching people to pray. It has surprised me, as a young priest, to hear again and again the desire of the Catholic people for direction on how to pray. It surprised me, that is, until I began to reflect on my own initial fits and starts in the life of prayer and how I too asked for help. The first disciples expressed this desire with a wonderful bluntness: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). The Vatican, in announcing 2024 as a “Year of Prayer,” highlighted Eucharistic adoration as a place in which Christ answers this request.⁷ Thus, it’s reasonable to conclude that the current interest in Eucharistic adoration, whatever other sources may be feeding it, is also an expression of the perennial desire, felt by every follower of Christ, to learn to pray more deeply.

Positing a link between adoration and the desire to learn to pray leads to a simple question: How does Eucharistic adoration teach Catholics to pray? I think the Church suggests some answers to that question in the rites that surround Eucharistic adoration — in particular, the current rites of Exposition and Benediction, which bookend many holy hours. Central to these short rites (almost always) are two hymns from the pen of St. Thomas Aquinas: O salutaris Hostia and Tantum ergo. These hymns are rich and, I would add, often untapped resources for priest and laity alike, precisely because they express basic and deep truths about prayer. Saint Thomas’s mastery of the spiritual life is evident in these short verses, and it is no surprise that the Church has given his words pride of place in her practice of Eucharistic worship. These hymns, I argue, offer a rich pastoral catechesis linking adoration and prayer. Additionally, these hymns suggest that our Eucharistic revival must also be a revival in deep forms of Christian prayer.

History

Before analyzing the theological insights of St. Thomas’s hymns, it will be helpful to provide a brief history of their composition and use in the liturgy. As is well known, the O salutaris Hostia and the Tantum ergo are short excerpts from hymns St. Thomas composed at the request of Pope Urban IV for the newly instituted feast of Corpus Christi.⁸ The O salutaris Hostia is the last two verses from the hymn for Lauds, Verbum supernum prodiens. The Tantum ergo is the last two verses of Pange lingua, St. Thomas’s hymn for first Vespers of the feast. According to the careful work of Fr. Paul Murray, O.P., the Tantum ergo “has been sung at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament since the fifteenth century.”⁹ The use of the O salutaris Hostia for the beginning of exposition is harder to trace, although some bishops in English-speaking countries began requiring it within the last couple centuries.¹⁰

According to the reformed rites of Exposition and Benediction published in 1973, neither the O salutaris Hostia nor the Tantum ergo are required. The document — “Holy Communion and the Worship of the Eucharist Outside of Mass” — offers only some general guidelines.¹¹ For example, “during the exposition there should be prayers, songs, and readings to direct the attention of the faithful to the worship of Christ the Lord.”¹² At the end of the time of adoration, and in preparation for Benediction, “a hymn or other eucharistic song is sung.”¹³ There are some suggested hymns in an appendix, an appendix unsurprisingly dominated by St. Thomas’s Corpus Christi hymns. It seems, however, that the O salutaris Hostia and the Tantum ergo — whether in the original Latin or in English translation — still mark the beginning and end of most Holy Hours in this country. So, it is completely acceptable, rubrically, to use hymns other than St. Thomas’s. But perhaps it is simply the case that many priests who promote adoration do not mind sticking to tried and true classics.

Teaching Us to Pray

The fittingness of these two hymns for Exposition and Benediction goes deeper than the mere fact that they were composed for the Eucharistic feast of Corpus Christi. Their deeper fittingness has to do with how St. Thomas fuses perennial Catholic teachings about prayer with Eucharistic devotion. I will discuss each hymn in turn. I will focus on the first stanza of each, given that the second stanza of each is more generically doxological in character.

Prayer as a Battle: O salutaris Hostia

The O salutaris highlights the truth that prayer is and always will be a battle. Right at the beginning of a period of adoration, the congregation sings:

O salutaris Hostia

Quae caeli pandis ostium:

Bella premunt hostilia,

Da robur, fer auxilium.

O saving Victim,

Who throws open the gate of heaven,

Hostile wars press upon us,

Give strength, bring aid.¹⁴

Now, it might seem a bit melodramatic to claim “hostile wars press upon us” as we kneel in a quiet church, surrounded by the smell of incense and flickering candles. But St. Thomas is here repeating, in lyric form, ancient Catholic teaching about prayer — a teaching that needs retrieving today.

It is the Christian conviction that prayer is a battle.¹⁵ Saint Paul uses military imagery in an exhortation to prayer: “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Eph 6:11–12). The desert Fathers gave the paradigmatic early expression to this conviction. For one example, consider the following teaching from Abba Agathon.

I think there is no labor greater than that of prayer to God. For every time a man wants to pray, his enemies, the demons, want to prevent him, for they know that it is only by turning him from prayer that they can hinder his journey. Whatever good work a man undertakes, if he perseveres in it, he will attain rest. But prayer is warfare to the last breath.¹⁶

Prayer is warfare. It is warfare with ourselves, our lack of attentiveness, our fatigue, and it is warfare with the powers and principalities that wish us not to pray. “Prayer is warfare to the last breath,” because it is only at the last breath that the full fruits of a life of prayer will be present or absent. Every Catholic goes through times of struggling with attention in prayer, and that struggle can lead some people to give up on prayer. But simply by articulating the truth that prayer is a battle, we can free people from the fear that they are somehow “doing it wrong” when it is difficult.

In prayer, we especially fight to be attentive to God. Saint Thomas makes this point not only in his hymn, but in his theological meditation on prayer in the Summa Theologiae. In an article about prayer, Thomas asks whether attention is necessary for prayer.¹⁷ He gives a nuanced response to this question, noting that even holy people struggle to keep their attention in prayer. He states that being distracted does not take away from the merit or supplicatory power of our prayer, as long as we set out with a good intention. But attention to God himself is absolutely necessary, Thomas argues, if we are to enjoy an important effect of prayer — what he calls “the spiritual refreshment of the mind.”¹⁸ He writes, “That . . . kind of attention is most necessary, and even idiots are capable of it. Moreover this attention, whereby the mind is fixed on God, is sometimes so strong that the mind forgets all other things.”¹⁹ In other words, paying attention to God himself is a battle, but a fruitful one.

How do these truths about prayer relate to Eucharistic adoration? Eucharistic adoration, often spoken about as a time of peace, recollection, intimacy with the Lord — which it certainly is — is also a time of deep conflict. Anyone who has prayed consistently before the Eucharist knows this, and Thomas’s hymn expresses this truth beautifully. Hostile wars do rage around and within the soul, even in the silence of adoration. Yet it is also in the silence of adoration that many Catholics learn to taste victory in Christ. As Ven. Fulton Sheen once said, “No man is really happy on the inside until he is at war with himself.”²⁰ In adoration, I would argue, many Catholics today are being taught by God to pray. In that time of prayer, they are experiencing both the spiritual battle and the spiritual refreshment that comes through, and on the other side of, spiritual conflict.

Prayer and Faith: Tantum ergo

Turning now to the Tantum ergo, imagine yourself in the setting of a Holy Hour. You’ve made it through the hour, the battle has at times been fierce, but you’ve stood your post and held the line. The end of the Holy Hour arrives and the priest emerges from the sacristy, wearing a cope, and the congregation sings Thomas’s lyrics:

Tantum ergo sacramentum

veneremur cernui,

et antiquum documentum

novo cedat ritui,

praestet fides supplementum

sensum defectui.

Let us therefore, prostrate,

adore such a great sacrament,

and let the old teaching

yield to the new rite;

let faith stand forward to supply the deficiency of the senses.²¹

The verse begins with an encouragement to adoration: “Let us therefore, prostrate, adore such a great sacrament” in Murray’s literal translation. It is the last lines of this verse that I want to focus on: praestet fides suplementum, sensum defectui — “let faith stand forward to supply the deficiency of the senses.” Edward Caswall’s classic translation is more poetic if less precise: “Faith for all defects supplying/ where the feeble senses fail.”

Here, in the context of adoration, Thomas offers Catholics a potent reflection on faith, prayer, and the Eucharist. By placing these words in the rite of Benediction, the Church instructs us that Eucharistic adoration is always a testing ground of faith. That is a good thing, as that faith is always at the center of the battle of prayer. Groeschel expresses this insight with typical pluck:

An overlooked spiritual benefit of Holy Communion is that it confronts the believer with mystery. To look at the wafer and the sip of wine . . . and to believe that because of the spoken words of a mortal man . . . that this is the living body of Christ, is a test of faith. Some people shy away from this test, but I say, “Great!”²²

Groeschel echoes St. Thomas’s own observation that believing in the Eucharist pertains to the “perfection of faith,” since Christ asks us to believe not only in his hidden divinity, as he asked his disciples while on earth, but also in his humanity, now veiled behind the appearance of bread and wine.²³ Right at the conclusion of adoration, in preparation for receiving the Eucharistic blessing, the Tantum ergo calls Catholics to make a concrete act of faith: “That host is you, Jesus, man and God.”

Making acts of faith is of the essence of a life of prayer. It used to be the case that children were taught in their catechism classes to make acts of faith. Why is it important to make acts of faith? It’s important because although the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are infused in us, God gives us the dignity of being able to exercise these virtues. We receive the habit of faith at baptism, but we need to use it. As we bring faith to act in God’s Eucharistic presence, we become stronger in the theological life as a whole.

The prayer of faith we make in the presence of the Eucharistic Lord can become the seed of praying without ceasing (1 Thes 5:17). Time spent in adoration helps us live the rest of our lives in such a way that we are consciously relative to God at every moment of the day. By testing and strengthening our faith, Eucharistic adoration tests and strengthens our prayer. Those who persevere in this prayer discover that faith does supply “where the feeble senses fail,” both as we adore the Eucharist and, indeed, in through every moment of the day.

Conclusion

Every Catholic pursuing a life of prayer asks: “Lord, teach us to pray.” Today, it seems that God is especially answering that prayer in the context of Eucharistic adoration. It’s providential that our Eucharistic revival overlaps with the Year of Prayer declared by Pope Francis. In our day, many people are learning to engage in the battle of prayer in a communal atmosphere of silent, intense attentiveness before the Blessed Sacrament. Such a spiritual exercise is particularly necessary in an age accustomed to relying on cheap psychological comforts and an addictive, immature dependence on the senses. Eucharistic adoration helps Catholics learn to adore God in faith, which strengthens the theological life as a whole and helps us to pray always. Thus, if we listen to St. Thomas’s hymns, sung every day in parishes around this country, we can fuel the flames of our Eucharistic revival and make it, in addition, a revival of deep and powerful prayer.