NEW CANAAN, April 16, 2026 — Tonight, award-winning Catholic author and ministry founder Maureen Pratt brought an engaged St. Aloysius Church audience to song, and in doing so, offered those gathered something far more than a musical performance. Her presentation, “Two-Fold Prayer and the Journey to Peace,” was sponsored by The Forum for Catholic Discipleship Lectures, previously the Diocese of Bridgeport’s Bishop’s Lecture Series.
Pratt, founder and executive director of The Peace in the Storm Project, a national Catholic ministry dedicated to accompanying family caregivers and persons living with chronic illness and ongoing pain, provided a presentation steeped in scholarly formation and deeply personal experience. She holds degrees from Georgetown University, UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, and the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, and is the author of eleven books.
The Forum’s director, Suan Sonna, introduced Pratt warmly, noting that her voice is made particularly powerful by the fact that she has herself lived with multiple serious chronic illnesses, including lupus, and has walked the road of family caregiving. “She knows from the inside what it means to carry suffering while still searching for God’s peace,” Sonna told the audience, “and she has found it, not by escaping the storm, but by learning to pray through it.”
Pratt began her presentation by reflecting on the role music has played throughout her own life, from her father’s love of classical compositions to her mother’s fondness for musical theater and showtunes, from singing with a Georgetown choir during Pope John Paul II’s 1979 Mass on the National Mall to thirteen years as a cantor and choir member at a predominantly African American Catholic parish in South Los Angeles. “When we sing sacred music, when we sing songs of faith,” she told the audience, “we are bringing into our hearts and our lives and our bodies a greater sense of nearness with God.”
She organized her talk around five spiritual movements in which song and prayer intersect: praise after hardship, strength before a challenge, strength during a challenge, growth in trust and joy, and gratitude as legacy. Drawing on Scripture, Church teaching, and lived experience, she walked the congregation through each theme and invited them to sing their way through as well.
She pointed to Moses and Miriam’s song in Exodus 15 as the first great moment of sung praise in Scripture, a spontaneous outpouring of thanks to God upon crossing the Red Sea. In the text, Moses leads the people in song, and then the prophetess Miriam, Aaron’s sister, takes up a tambourine as the women join in dancing. “Singing, percussion, rhythm, all of that in praise,” Pratt observed, drawing a direct line between that ancient moment and the congregation’s own capacity to lift their voices through difficulty. She then led everyone in singing “Sing to the Mountains.” “What matters is the song in the heart that carries us along in prayer and connects us more greatly with the Lord,” she said.
For the theme of strength before a challenge, Pratt turned to the Gospel account of Jesus and his disciples singing a hymn before going out to the Mount of Olives, a Scripture passage, she noted, that the community had encountered just weeks earlier during Holy Week. The congregation joined her in singing “Be Not Afraid.”
“Singing helps us breathe,” Pratt said. “It helps us relax. We have to take a deep breath to be able to sing.”
Perhaps the most moving segment of the evening came when Pratt spoke of strength in the midst of crisis itself. She recounted the story of Thomas A. Dorsey, credited as the father of gospel music, who was at the height of his touring career when he received word that his young wife, Nettie, had died in childbirth. By the time he returned home, his infant son had also died. From that devastation, Dorsey wrote “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” Pratt drew a parallel between the Red Sea, the river of liberation, and the dark river Dorsey describes in his lyrics: a rocky, uncomfortable passage navigated only by reaching for God’s hand. The congregation sang it together, quietly and deliberately. “When we’re in these situations, if we pull away from God, we’re denying ourselves the comfort we need at times of real crisis,” Pratt said. “If we lean into God, even just a prayer of ‘Please, Lord, be with me,’ we can find greater strength, comfort, and peace.”
Pratt also wove in the story of “Silent Night” to illustrate growth in trust. The poem was written in 1816, she explained, and set to music two years later when a Catholic church in Austria found its organ broken just before Christmas, leaving only a guitar. What could have been a crisis became an occasion for simplicity, and through that simplicity, a deeper joy. “Think of a simple kind of Christmas,” she told the congregation as they sang the carol together, encouraging them to listen to the voices on either side of them.
Pratt closed the evening by leading all present in the traditional hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing,” asking everyone to stand and to listen as much as to sing, to notice the tapestry of voices around them. It was a fitting conclusion to an evening that had itself been a kind of two-fold prayer: spoken and sung, individual and communal, carried on the breath of people who have known suffering and found, in music, a way through.
