Catholic personal and meditative prayer
Prayer in a person's own words, and the meditative disciplines the tradition teaches.
Alongside its public forms the tradition assumes a private life of prayer. The Catechism distinguishes vocal prayer, meditation (including lectio divina, slow prayerful reading of Scripture), and contemplative prayer, and sorts prayer's content into blessing and adoration, petition, intercession, thanksgiving, and praise. Spontaneous prayer in one's own words is normal, and set prayers learned in childhood often become the vocabulary from which it grows.
Alongside the fixed liturgy sits a large tradition of personal prayer, and the Catholic tradition is unusual in how much it has written down about method. Lectio divina reads a short passage of scripture slowly and repeatedly. Ignatian meditation places the person imaginatively inside a gospel scene. Centring prayer works towards wordless attention.
None of these is obligatory and none of them replaces the Mass. They are taught in retreats, in spiritual direction, and increasingly in parish groups.
What they share is a suspicion of hurry. Each of them takes a small amount of material and stays with it much longer than a first reading would suggest is warranted.
Does it have a text?
These are methods rather than texts, and they have no fixed wording. What a person prays with is usually scripture, and this site holds several psalms and the Beatitudes in named public-domain editions.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Catholic
- The Mass — The central act of Catholic worship, fixed in text and repeated daily worldwide.
- The Liturgy of the Hours — The prayer of the psalms at set times of day, obligatory for clergy and open to anyone.
- The Rosary — A counted devotion pairing repeated prayers with meditation on events in the life of Christ.
- Novenas — Nine days of prayer for a particular intention, usually to a particular saint.
- Eucharistic Adoration — Prayer before the exposed sacrament, often silent and often for a set hour.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.