The president of the United States is currently hospitalized with COVID-19. We did not pray for him at Mass today.

This is a thread on why that’s a problem.

The first is that if praying for the health and safety of any individual human being is seen as political, then we as a Church have lost our fundamental sense of the dignity of human life.

What bothers me more about this though is how easily we pray for generalized groups of people as a Church rather than for individuals. We pray for hypotheticals rather than for actual people whom God came to save.

It’s easy to love a hypothetical person and pray for them. The reality of humanity is much messier. We realize that we like some parts of people but not others, and we want to pray only for the parts we like.

God does not love in hypotheticals. And for some mysterious reason, He doesn’t love only the good parts of us either. He loves and comes to redeem all of us, every part of who we are.

Pray for people by name. Recall their faces and present them to the Lord, whether you like them or not. In fact, pray especially for the people you don’t like. That’s what Jesus told us to do.

And if you see this tweet and feel the need to respond, you are more than welcome. Know that I’ll be praying for you by name and presenting all of who you are to our God who loves us infinitely.