Prayer and Catholic Universities

I want to underscore the importance of what Rick's student writes below about prayer, a point that was brought home to me by a remark that Alasdair MacIntyre made in response to a question following this lecture at Notre Dame ("On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture"--the video is on the upper right hand corner of the web page, and the queston and MacIntyre's reply start at 1:25). The questioner asked about the centrality of the practice of prayer in a university to the search for truth, beauty, and goodness. I can't do justice to MacIntyre's reply, but he began by saying that we are apt to think of certain aspects of religious belief as part of a public conversation with people of different (or no) religious belief, while prayer is viewed as "private" (even liturgical prayer is among those of "us" who adhere to a particular tradition). But it is, MacIntyre said, important that we present ourselves (MM: humbly and appropriately, of course) as people who pray, including listening amid silence, although that opens oneself up to dissent and scorn because prayer is, from a secular view, the most useless and superstitious manifestation of religious belief.

As Saint Augustine writes:

But again one might ask whether we are to pray by words or deeds and what need there is for prayer, if God already knows what is needful for us. But it is because the act of prayer clarifies and purges our heart and makes it more capable of receiving the divine gifts that are poured out for us in the spirit. God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give to us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one: but we are not always ready to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things out of a desire for temporal things. For in prayer there occurs a turning of the heart to he who is always ready to give if we will but take what he gives: and in that turning is the purification of the inner eye when the things we crave in the temporal world are shut out; so that the vision of the pure heart can bear the pure light that shines divinely without setting or wavering: and not only bear it, but abide in it; not only without difficulty, but even with unspeakable joy, with which the blessed life is truly and genuinely brought to fulfillment.

Augustine, On the Lord's Sermon on the Mount 2.3.14.