Two priests share thoughts on prayer
How can the people of this diocese help their new bishop become everything God intends for him to be?
“Pray,” said Bishop-elect Ralph B. O’Donnell. “Pray for me that God would continue to give me the grace to work and live as a bishop.
“That my thoughts, words and actions might bring glory to God’s name and that my service would pattern itself after Christ’s care and love for all of us,” he said.
His uncle, Father Ralph M. O’Donnell (1926-96), after whom the bishop-elect was named, wrote a weekly column for the Catholic Voice, newspaper of the Omaha archdiocese.
In one installment, he shared a prayer that had been given to him on a retreat shortly before his priestly ordination in 1952. Composed by a Vincentian martyr, the prayer “contains all the requests of the Lord Jesus that I could ever hope for and in some ways feel that I have received,” the bishop-elect’s uncle declared.
“O my Divine Savior, transform me into thyself. May my hands be the hands of Jesus. May my tongue be the tongue of Jesus. Grant that every faculty of my body may serve only to glorify thee. Above all, transform my soul and all its powers, that my memory, my will and my afflictions may be the memory, the will and the afflictions of Jesus. I pray thee to destroy in me all that is not of thee. Grant that I may live but in thee and by thee, and that I may truly say with St. Paul, ‘I live, now, not I, but Christ liveth in me.’”
In Fr. O’Donnell’s final column, published a few weeks after his sudden passing in 1996, he wrote about gratitude, concluding:
“This, then, is a moment for giving thanks. This is the moment for remembrance. Let us remember why we are here. We are here because we are Christians, because we have been drawn together by the Spirit which Christ said he would send into this world to unite us all and to lead us in the way of truth to be present among us until consummation of the world.
“We, then, are the Church, we are the Body of Christ. Let us remember those who are united with us at this time and let us give thanks for the bond of union — ‘one bread, one body, one faith, one Baptism, one Lord of all’” (Ephesians 4:4-6).
