Another sloppy petition in Evening Prayer

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 03, 2025

Just for fun, let’s review. A little over three years ago, I posted a brief commentary entitled Ersatz prayers of the faithful, in which I drew attention to a faulty intention in the petitionary prayers on a particular day in Evening Prayer—and of course we have all heard some strange or at least banal items in the Prayers of the Faithful at Mass.

Another petitionary pitfall popped up in Evening Prayer for this past Friday, February 28th:

You opened paradise to the thief who believed in you.
—Do not close the gates of heaven to the faithful departed.

This one is an offense to eye and ear because, of course, it is inconceivable (indeed, it is contrary to Faith) to suppose that God would ever refuse His Presence (Heaven) to the faithful departed.

Now, if you think about it, you might wonder whether the same objection might be made to the traditional Eternal Rest prayer:

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

But here we are attempting to include one or more souls, the fate of which we do not know, in what we do know about the souls of the faithful departed, and we are simply entreating God’s mercy while prayerfully affirming what we know about that mercy. We intend to pray that one or more particular persons will enjoy the eternal peace that God bestows on all His faithful ones—and our intention includes the shortening of their time in purgatory. These intentions are very different from presuming to tell God not to do something that, as a matter of Faith, we already know He would never do.

We all ought to be very careful about the wording of our prayers, though of course we will never pray perfectly. But even more should we expect those who play a formal role in developing, translating, and promulgating liturgical prayer to be...at least far more careful than this.