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Spiritual Life
Formation pathways, guided devotions, and step-by-step checklists for growing in holiness.
Fasting
The Church's oldest and simplest common penance: on appointed days the faithful take no meat, so that the whole body of Christians denies itself the same thing on the same day.
Almsgiving
The corporal and spiritual works of mercy: giving to the poor in justice and love as a sign of conversion and a remedy for sin.
Other
A short written plan of prayer, penance, study and charity, proportioned to one's state and duties, kept with a director's help and reviewed periodically — the ordinary means by which good intentions become an actual spiritual life.
Contemplative prayer
The gathering of the scattered faculties inward to the God who dwells within the soul — the prayer of recollection St Teresa of Ávila teaches in the Way of Perfection, in which the senses are drawn in and the will rests with the Lord who is nearer than any image of him.
Mortification
The voluntary self-denial by which a Christian, in union with the Cross of Christ, masters disordered desires and grows in freedom and charity.
Contemplative prayer
Wordless prayer of loving attention to God, a gift the Holy Spirit may grant to those who persevere in mental prayer.
Mortification
The deliberate guarding of what one looks at, undertaken for the sake of purity of heart and of an undivided attention to God — an ancient discipline that the age of screens has made newly urgent rather than obsolete.
Mortification
The steady freeing of the heart from disordered attachment to created goods, so that it can love God above them and love them rightly in him — the Carmelite discipline St John of the Cross sets out in the Ascent of Mount Carmel.
Discernment
The art of distinguishing the movement of the Holy Spirit from other movements (one's own spirit, the evil spirit).
Vocal prayer
Very short prayers — a sentence, a name, a single cry — sent up repeatedly through the course of a day, so that prayer is not confined to the times set aside for it and the habit of God's presence is kept alive in the middle of work.
Family
The daily prayer of a household together — the family understood as the domestic church, and the parents as the first teachers of prayer to their children by praying in front of them and not only over them.
Fasting
Voluntary abstinence from food or other goods as a penitential and spiritual discipline.
Other
Living with less on purpose — the Franciscan way of poverty, gratitude and fraternity that frees the heart for God, restores a right relation to created things, and puts the disciple within reach of the poor.
Mercy
The spiritual work of mercy by which a Christian speaks privately and charitably to another about a fault, in the manner the Lord himself prescribes — and which, done any other way, becomes detraction rather than mercy.
Penance
The keeping of every Friday of the year as a penitential day in memory of the Lord's death — by abstinence from meat, or, where the bishops' conference permits, by another act of penance freely chosen and faithfully kept.
Other
The devout use of the Church's grants of indulgence — the remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt is already forgiven — for oneself or for the souls in purgatory.
Contemplative prayer
Prayer in which the imagination and the senses are put at the service of faith: the one praying enters a scene of the Gospel, watches and listens, takes part in it, and speaks with the Lord who is present there. It is the characteristic prayer of the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises.
Examen
A daily five-step prayer of review, given by St. Ignatius of Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises.
Other
Ordering the whole of Sunday — not the hour of Mass alone — around the Lord's resurrection: participation in the Eucharist, abstention from the work and business that hinder worship and rest, and the deliberate use of the day for joy, family and works of mercy.
Lectio divina
An ancient monastic practice of slow, prayerful reading of Sacred Scripture in four movements.
Family
Living the married state as the actual road to sanctity for those called to it — the spouse and the children being not obstacles to holiness but its ordinary means, and the daily asceticism of common life being the school in which charity is learned.
Vocal prayer
Praying the Rosary as St John Paul II asks it to be prayed — not as a recitation of Aves but as a contemplation of the face of Christ in the company of his Mother, with the mystery announced, a Scripture text heard, and silence kept before the beads begin.
Other
The Christian remembrance of death: not morbidity but readiness, practised so that the hour no one can predict finds a soul in the state of grace, its affairs settled and its hope in the resurrection.
Contemplative prayer
Interior prayer in which the mind and heart seek God through reflection, especially on the mysteries of Christ, leading to acts of love and resolutions.
Examen
A short, honest review of the day's thoughts, words, deeds and omissions made each night before God, measured against the commandments, the Beatitudes and the duties of one's state, and ending in contrition and one concrete resolution.
Work
The Benedictine ordering of a whole day between the Work of God, prayerful reading and manual labour, so that no hour is empty, no work is severed from prayer, and the day has a shape given to it rather than one it falls into.
Pilgrimage
A pardon is a typically Breton form of pilgrimage and one of the most traditional demonstrations of popular Catholicism in Brittany. Of very ancient origin, probably dating back to the conversion of the country by the Celtic monks, it is comparable to the pattern days of pre-famine Ireland.
Other
The ordinary Catholic's share in the Church's mission: a life that raises the question, and a readiness to answer it plainly when it is asked — carried on among the people one already knows rather than among strangers.
Pilgrimage
A journey to a holy place undertaken as an act of devotion, penance, or thanksgiving.
Vocal prayer
The threefold daily pause — at dawn, at midday and at dusk — in which the faithful recall the Annunciation and the Word made flesh, marking the hours of the working day with the Incarnation.
