Pray — The Story of a Priest, the Rosary and the Power of Prayer
By: Rj Carr
Tags: Rosary, Film, Prayer, Patrick Peyton, Catholic

Pray — The Story of a Priest, the Rosary and the Power of Prayer RJ Carr Follow Oct 7 · 10 min read

On October 9th, Pray — a documentary about Father Patrick Peyton, will come to many local theatres around the country. The movie tells the story of an Irish immigrant ordained a Holy Cross Father in the Roman Catholic Church who brought people all over the world to their knees — praying the Rosary.

The film includes never before seen footage from the archives of Father Peyton’s media work.

I spoke with Fr. David Guffey, CSC, executive producer of Pray, about the movie and Father Peyton’s story.

[Father Guffey’s words are in bold. Mine are anything not in bold.]

I saw Pray actually this morning and I knew about Father Peyton, but I didn’t know how little I knew. It was a powerful biography. I greatly enjoyed it. What brought you to do this movie at this time?

We thought that we were able to really show Father Peyton and use his voice and his words and that would help get his message out again for this age.

It was just so clear that the family has so many struggles today. Father Peyton thought the family had struggles in the early 1940s when he started the Family Rosary Crusade. It’s nothing compared to the pressures that families have today from outside influences as well as from all the kinds of pressures that families have always had relationally and spiritually. So, it’s bringing those two things together. It seemed like it would be good to introduce the world anew to the message and the person of Father Peyton.

I was fascinated by what would be considered maybe his lowest point — wanting to go to the seminary but getting tuberculosis and it basically sidelined him for a year. It was there that his whole vocation actually came together.

He was in his last year at the seminary (1938). Our theologate [theology school] at the time was in Washington, DC. Holy Cross had a college connected to Catholic University there and in October he coughed. He had a spot of blood and then he had tuberculosis and that really knocked him out.

He and his brother entered the seminary at the same time. They always wanted to be ordained together but this really just stopped him in his tracks. He had a severe case of tuberculosis and that’s really in that time when he was flat on his back and really became more and more helpless. He discovered the importance of prayer in his life and turned to it in a huge way, especially prayer asking for the intercession of the Blessed Mother. As the story goes, he was healed, he believed, through the intercession of the Blessed Mother.

The next couple of years, his big question was ‘How do I respond to this?’ I think often when people have a powerful experience of grace, there’s such gratitude that it happened and then you have to figure out what you do with it. He knew he’d always have a devotion to the Blessed Mother but he didn’t want it just to be a devotional expression of gratitude. Although that could have been enough. He wanted to do it with his whole life.

It’s in that kind of convalescence, he had he had a little job. He started out as a chaplain at the Holy Cross Brothers High School in Albany, New York. That last year of theology, the deacon year and early priesthood that he really prayed and came up with the call of his life, which was to spread the message of family prayer, especially the rosary. He spent the rest of his life single-heartedly pursuing that.

What you described is that whole focus of prayer was not there prior to the disease. He was interested in becoming a priest but it was there that he really learned prayer because that is what saved his life.

It was. He grew up praying the rosary daily because it was part of his devotional life. There’s a difference between praying because it’s a habit, praying because it’s a nice thing in your life and really discovering that prayer is your life. Prayer is what makes your life what it is.