The Power of Prayer: a response to Jen Psaki
Daniel Turner • September 3, 2025
Hearing news of children being brutally murdered will always be terribly painful—more so when these children are in what ought to be one of the safest places in the world for them. In the case of this Wednesday’s shooting, which occurred at the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis, the fact that it happened during the first Mass of the school year made it sting all the more.
Earlier that morning, as my wife and I dropped our children off at their respective childcare settings, she expressed her reluctance ever to move to the United States, with school shootings chief among her reasons. I argued that whilst a problem, it would be extremely unlikely that our children would ever find themselves caught in such an atrocity. Tragically, the parents of the victims will have rightly hoped the same.
As is common after such events, people flooded online platforms to express their horror and state that their thoughts and prayers were with those impacted. What few saw coming was the response. “Prayer is not freaking enough. Prayers do not end school shootings. Prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers,” wrote former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on X.
Whilst shocking, ignorant, and offensive, the political implications of this statement—namely, that given the number of these shootings, it is utterly insane that more is not done to limit their occurrence—are ones that many of us non-American observers find perfectly reasonable. Nevertheless, we cannot move too swiftly from the anchoring point of Psaki’s argument: that prayer equals inaction.
The truth is quite the opposite. Holistically understood, prayer is a multi-dimensional act which serves to benefit both individuals and communities. As Vice President JD Vance alluded to in his response to Psaki, one such benefit is that “we pray because our hearts are broken and we believe that God is listening.” In a world full of pain and suffering, for many, the knowledge that there is a Being who sits above it all, in whom “all things work together for good,” is a great source of comfort.
Our prayers are not said in vain to an uncaring void, but instead become a place of encounter with God—both in his immanence: the loving Father who mourns with his children, and in his transcendence: the omnipotent God of the universe who holds all of creation in his hand. As such, they have power—both to bring about great external change, and also, perhaps more commonly, to provoke profound internal change.
Writing on this in the third century, Origen states: “prayer is a turning of the mind and heart away from all else, and directing them to Him alone.” In other words, prayer often acts not simply as a means to present a list of demands, but as a reorientation of our whole being towards the source of all that is good, true, and beautiful—that in so doing, we might, like mirrors, reflect back these divine properties. Furthermore, in God, and particularly in the person of Christ, we find an ideal: a mode of understanding and being in this world. In times of suffering and despair, this ideal becomes all the more important, especially as we begin to consider our response.
In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI speaks to this even more profoundly when he describes the ‘threefold responsibility’ of the Church as being “proclaiming the word of God (kerygma–martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia).” What’s more, he emphasised that these duties do not exist in isolation, but that they “presuppose each other and are inseparable.” From this, we see a crucial reality that secular attitudes such as Psaki’s overlook: our ability to enter into grace-filled ministry to the world—be it through work, charity or politics—is fuelled by the spiritual food given to us in prayer and, most of all, the Eucharist. Likewise, the burdens that we experience in life are often what we bring to prayer.
Nevertheless, where Psaki might be said to be correct is that despite the countless similar incidents that have occurred in the past, little can be said to have been done. Whether an outright ban on all firearms, greater checks on those who acquire weapons, or mandatory training for all purchasers, the answer to this situation is not simple, and will not come without its downsides.
But, as we see from Benedict’s model, our prayers must feed into action lest we be found guilty of negligence. For the majority of us, that action will not be a political one. Instead, our regular intercession for the souls of the lives lost and their families, which leads us into the decision to better love our neighbours, is plenty.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.