To be Catholic is to believe that the Church's prayers - far from being exercises in futility, with pain and war and horror grinding on implacably in spite of our prayers - really are, literally, taken into the mystery of the Divine Mercy and put to work, so to speak. On the Catholic view, the prayers of the Church are joined with the mystery of Christ's intercession for us, which itself culminates in his total oblation of himself for us to the Father; and all of this is caught up into the region where the Mercy and Providence of God well up in their eternal superabundance and overflow, inundating the world with redemption.

This region is still impenetrable by us mortals. "We see not yet all things put under thee." How the Mercy and Providence of God will turn out to have been unfailingly sovereign in this world of sorrow, blight, cruelty, and disenfranchisement is unimaginable to us. Just here is the sorest test to faith...

To be Catholic is to be obliged to take one's place with all the men and women of faith from the beginning. It has rarely seemed otherwise than that God is very absent. Joseph is sold into Egypt, and years of wrong go unredressed, it seems. The Philistines seize the very Ark of God, and fire does not strike them. Hannah lives, forlorn, crying out for a son. The widow of Zarepta reaches her last handful of meal, and no help is in sight. Jerusalem itself, finally, is sacked, and the Chosen People are bundled off to slavery under an Eastern tyrant. Domine! Exaudi orationem meam! How long, O Lord?

To be Catholic, we say, is to take one's place with the men and women of faith from the beginning. All of them had to wait. The salvation of the Lord did not come, and did not come. Nevertheless they presented themselves at his altar, day by day, year after bone-wearying year. Simeon and Anna would be the archetypes here, wrinkled and old and faithful. But heaven does not open. No divine thunder terrorizes God's enemies.

Only a penurious young woman and her husband, bringing an infant to be presented in the temple one fine day - and Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace...

But we want Herod toppled, and Caesar overthrown, and our chains sundered, and Israel's dignity and liberty restored.

Indeed. And it is all of that which faith sees in this Infant.

This is the vision at work in the Church's intercessions.

We pray for the world, and famine, war, disease, and injustice crawl on their implacable way. We pray for the Church and disaffected religious, discontented priests, unfaithful bishops, and baleful theologians drown out the voice of the Magisterium. We pray for the sick and they die. Let us give over this farcical business.

But faith - the faith of the Church it is, not simply my own attempts to soldier on - takes its place with Simeon and Anna, and with the psalms, which are sure, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that God is the champion of widows, orphans, and all the dispossessed and enfeebled.