An organization with few uniquely Christian characteristics, the Pax Christi Movement describes itself as an "international Catholic peace movement with members worldwide." In the United States, Pax Christi publishes a pamphlet called "Prayers For a Peaceful World: Let Peace Fill My Heart." The pamphlet consists of a short exhortation to "imagine, reflect, and pray for peace," followed by seven prayers for each day of the week.
Of the seven prayers, only two claim Catholic authorship. None mentions Christ, and four are explicitly non-Christian prayers: the "Universal Peace Prayer," the "Buddhist Meditation," the "Native American Prayer," and the Vedanta prayer by Swami Sivananda. Only one of the seven prayers addresses God. The four non-Christian prayers don't mention God at all. The last prayer, by Swami Sivananda, at least alludes to the divinity by making the claim that we ourselves can become divine! The divinization of man in Swami Sivananda's prayer is incompatible with the Christian's humility before the godhead. (Note also the way Pax Christi infects even Sivananda's prayer with feminist grammar, eschewing pronoun agreement to avoid the word "him.").
This prayer book reflects a facet of the newfangled theology which denies the exclusive, supernatural quality of Christianity and seeks to put the natural religious feelings of all men on par with our divinely instituted religion. Hence, the pamphlet presents the humanistic enjoinder to "let peace fill my heart, my world, my universe" (with no mention of God) alongside Saint Francis of Assisi's famous prayer. The pamphlet offers the esoteric Native American Prayer--"the world before me is restored in beauty"--as an equal to the prayer of Saint Teresa of Avila. The warnings of Exodus 34:12-14 fade, and we're encouraged rather to pray the prayers of those who don't hold the Christian faith.
Now, it's true that all people ought to aspire to peace. The aspiration to peace is laudable whenever it's genuine. When the other religions contain prayers of peace, these expressions are expressions of the natural religion. Although these expressions are always mixed with error, some shreds of them are true. Nevertheless, the aspiration to peace, even when it exists in the other religions, has nothing to do with Christian prayer because the other religions have nothing to do with grace. Only the members of the Christian religion can attain saving grace. Only the Christian religion is supernatural and has a divine founder. As we see in Wisdom 13:1-9, the natural religious feelings of men are not automatically good. Such feelings are held to a high standard. They always must tend to Christian truth, at the arrival of which, but not before, the person will have found grace and the means of salvation. The other religions can't substitute for Christianity as an alternative means to grace. Their errors stand in the way of salvation and are a blindness. For this reason, and in virtue of the first commandment, non-Christian prayers have no place in a Catholic prayer book.
In contrast to the other religions, Christ founded the Christian religion and handed its truths to the apostles. From that moment, the Christian revelation was complete, and Christianity doesn't need to learn anything, and indeed literally can't learn anything concerning religious truth, from the other religions.
