Religious should say the beads, hear Mass, and offer holy communion frequently for our holy Mother the Church, for our holy Father the Pope, for bishops, priests, and superiors, for the needs of our country, for universal peace, for the conversion of sinners, and all those who do not belong to the one fold of Christ; and last, but not least, for the holy, suffering souls in purgatory.
Father Girardev, dwelling on the subject of prayer, writes:
"In praying for temporal favors for ourselves, we can claim unconditionally only the necessaries of life, for in the Our Father 'our daily bread' is equivalent to the necessaries of life, but does not include its superfluities or luxuries; and the words ' deliver us from evil ' do not necessarily include, as we have seen, deliverance from physical evils, for the evil here meant is sin and all that leads to sin. We have no reason to hope that God will hear our prayers for those temporal favors that may prove hurtful to our salvation, or that He will exempt us from certain corporal pains and trials, if such an exemption would lead us to sin or endanger our salvation. The granting of such prayers would be, not a favor, but a terrible punishment. We should, then, ask for temporal favors conditionally — that is, under the condition that they may promote our salvation, or at least not hinder it. We ought never to lose sight of this saying of our loving Redeemer: 'What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?' (Matt, xvi. 26.)
"Let us not be so solicitous for temporal favors, which, after all, may, as we have seen, prove hurtful to our soul, but let us rather pray for what is conducive to our eternal welfare. When we pray for temporals, and God, in His mercy, refuses them to us, it is because they would prove hurtful to us. 'But,' says St. Gregory of Nazianzen, 'he who asks God for a real favor (that is, for a favor that is
