Why Pray a Novena? by Michael Dubruiel

        The Church's Most Powerful Novenas is a book of novenas connected with particular shrines compiled by Michael Dubruiel .  

Reasons to Pray a Novena by Michael Dubruiel:

3. Praying a novena teaches us the benefit of praying with others to God.

While the Second Vatican Council sought to renew a sense of the communal nature of prayer, some of the more zealous sought to achieve this by erasing one aspect of Catholicism where the sense of communal prayer was already a lived reality: the involvement of the Church Victorious the saints.

Recently while I was visiting an Eastern Orthodox Church, the beauty and the symbolism of the iconostasis struck me. An iconostasis is a wall of icons (consisting of painted images of God, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints) that separates the sanctuary from the nave of the church. In Orthodox churches the walls are covered with icons as a testament that when we on earth gather in prayer, we do not pray alone, but are joined by all of those who have gone before us and are now in heaven.

The next day, while I was at Mass in an innercity church in Detroit, Michigan, I was struck by the statues of the saints (which, in the post-Vatican II Church, are a rarity) and how much they resembled the iconostasis of the Orthodox Church, except ours were three-dimensional. Obviously, the presence of the saints in both churches is a testament that God wants all of us to pray for one another, and that does not stop when our earthly life is over.