CARDINAL MANNING'S PRAYER
FOR LIGHT FROM THE HOLY SPIRIT

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This prayer for light addressed to the Holy Spirit was composed by Henry Edward Cardinal Manning (pictured in this medal above), an Anglican convert who was influential in establishing the doctrine of Papal Infallibility in the first Vatican Council in 1870.

He helped to settle the London Dock Strike of 1889 and contributed to the influential encyclical Rerum Novarum from Pope Leo XIII in 1891 that is said to have helped define modern Catholic Social Teaching in its support for labor unions for just working conditions and pay, while at the same time rejecting both socialism and unrestricted capitalism and affirming private property rights.

Cardinal Manning in this prayer below brings to mind Jesus’ words in the Gospels that what is within a person, as in his soul, as being of paramount importance, either for good or for evil.

O Holy Spirit of God,
take me as Thy disciple.
Guide me, illuminate me,
sanctify me.
Bind my hands that they may
do no evil.
Cover my eyes that they may see it no more.
Sanctify my heart that evil
may not dwell within me.
Be Thou my God. Be Thou my Guide.
Withersoever Thou leadest me I will go.
Whatsoever Thou forbiddest
me I will renounce.
And whatsoever Thou
commandest me,
in Thy strength I will do.
Lead me then unto the fullness
of Thy truth.
Amen.

In the Last Supper discourse, Jesus movingly said to His disciples "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you…But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:15-17, 26).

Indeed, the Holy Spirit was quite actively involved in helping establish the early Church starting at Pentecost when the spirit came down on the disciples as tongues of fire emboldening them to proclaim the Gospel in languages they didn’t even know, as you may well remember.

But what of us nowadays? While we strive to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit it is important to approach Him with a conscience that has been catechized (as in one that has been properly educated into what is and is not worthy of Catholic belief.

Too many of us, even many Christians, have chloroformed our consciences instead these days with moral relativism, thinking our subjective feelings should guide our decisions. I will link to a number of books and articles available for further study on both the basics of our faith and those going more in depth in the table below this page.

Cardinal Manning's reference to the eyes in his prayer brings to mind this memorable quote from Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus called the eye “the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness” (Matt 6:22-23)!

For another good example, in reference to Manning’s prayer, this was our Lord’s spirited response to those Pharisees and scribes who were chiding His disciples for being religiously negligent in not washing their hands before eating: "Hear me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him….What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man"(Mark 7:15, 21-23).

Among Cardinal Manning’s writings is a book on the the Holy Spirit (known traditionally as the Holy Ghost as in the title of this work The Internal Mission of the Holy Ghost) in which he discussed at length the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, which we know as being wisdom, knowledge, understanding, counsel, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord.

One helpful way to remember the first four of these gifts is to reverse their order. Think of the Holy Spirit giving you the gift of counsel, that is to say the best and most pleasing way to God to proceed in a particular situation, so that you may understand what the Spirit is conveying to you, and then armed with that knowledge you may indeed have wisdom!

And when it comes to two other gifts of the Holy Spirit, you might remember President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous line from his Inaugural address on March 4th, 1933, which he delivered to an anxious America mired in the depths of the Depression. As he said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

When asking for the Holy Spirit’s gift of fortitude we may say instead that the only thing we have to fear is fear of the Lord itself, in that whatever trials may come our way, we ask His spirit for the grace to bear them with courage and dignity; and that the only fear we should seek to keep present in our lives is that fear of God’s Justice or better yet, fear of offending Him out of our deep love for Him.

Taken as a whole, these six gifts can help us to achieve and maintain the remaining one on this list, that of piety! Taking on that filial desire to love and not offend God, the gift of piety which, as the late Father John Hardon put it so well in his Modern Catholic Dictionary “engenders in the soul a filial respect for God, a generous love toward him, and an affectionate obedience that wants to do what he commands because it loves the one who commands”.

Cardinal Manning himself spoke of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit in a quite inspiring manner as follows:

These seven gifts dwell in every one of you. As they dwelt in the soul of our Divine Lord, to Whom we shall be conformed, precisely in that manner they dwell in every one of us. They are inseparably united to Sanctifying grace and charity; so that they who, through mortal sin, fall from sanctifying grace and charity no longer possess them.

What, then, is the nature of these seven gifts? I can only describe them in this way: the sanctifying grace of the Holy Ghost means that indwelling of the presence and power of the Holy Ghost whereby we are made holy. The seven gifts are Seven habits or dispositions, as I have said before, implanted in the soul, permanently abiding in it and giving activity to the will, enabling it to elicit or to call forth certain spiritual acts.”

The effect, then, of these seven gifts is to elicit the operations of grace. The word elicit means to draw or strike out. When we strike a spark out of a flint we elicit fire. The fire lies in the flint; it is always there, it is inseparable from it. The spark which passes from the flint does not exhaust the fire that lies in it; it does not even lessen it. So the acts of grace called forth by the seven gifts do not exhaust, but multiply and increase, our sanctification. Therefore they are inseparably united with sanctifying grace, and it is augmented by their activity.

As a reminder the sanctifying Grace the cardinal speaks of here includes that essential indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our souls that is our key to heaven. We can indeed lose it, as Manning wrote, by committing a mortal sin but fortunately we can get it back quickly through a sincere contrite heartfelt confession in the sacrament of Penance.

In conclusion let us recall the stirring plea at the end of the well-known Prayer to the Holy Spirit: “Holy Spirit, sweet guest of my soul, abide in me and grant that I may ever abide in Thee”