Reading the newspapers these past few months — described by one bishop as this year's lenten penance — leaves me sad, anxious and angry.

I go through them each morning during the train ride to work in Manhattan. This is just before I go to a quiet downtown church to pray before the Blessed Sacrament.

Eucharistic adoration has never been harder, or more meaningful, than in these days of trial and scandal for Catholics and their priests. I pray constantly for the Church as I learn once more that there is nothing like suffering to bring a person to his knees, for showing a suffocating soul that prayer is its only true lung.

The drumbeat of news makes me want to act. Or, at least, to talk about the problems, assess the damage and come up with the reasons why we are in this mess. I am inclined to see prayer as futile or of benefit only to me, a daily pick-me-up at best.

But a truer understanding of the necessity of eucharistic prayer for Christian survival is found in this prophetic observation, written in 1867 by Redemptorist Father Michael Muller: “When the most holy sacrament of the altar is not revered and loved, scandals will abound, faith will languish, and the Church will mourn.

“On the other hand,” he wrote, “if this sacrament be worthily frequented, peace will reign in Christian hearts, the devil will lose power, and souls will be sanctified.”

We have forgotten these truths — at all levels of the Church and for a host of reasons, some misguided and some downright evil.

It's not so much that we have to start from scratch, but to understand that scratch is all we can ever produce. Prayer that comes from a spirit of total poverty, without any safety net, is sublime and attractive to God.

Because of its apparent limits, prayer can seem secondary at a time like this. While other solutions seem to make sense, legal and public relations strategies, “zero-tolerance” policies, and earnest reforms of one stripe or another cannot liberate and redeem our hearts. Only the cry of the spiritually poor can save us, individually and collectively.

I kneel before the Blessed Sacrament in that Manhattan church, St. Andrew's by name, and I begin, once more, to adore the Eucharist.

The visible evidence tells me that, here, I touch no one. I help no one. I am no one. I am tempted to think that what I do here has no impact on anything. My desire for good brings no visible change. The swirl of so many sad events goes on and on.

The experience takes place in solitude and is something that would generate neither hostility nor admiration from most of the people who will soon pass me by on Broadway.

But I am God's instrument in that church and this work is tremendously important, a fact that makes me shudder. It humbles me and amazes me. Though impoverished, this effort is also priestly because I approach the sanctuary and kneel in the place where intercession is made.

I pray for priests good and bad, for the faithful, for renewal, for the enemies of the Church. If only every Catholic knew that he shares the priesthood of Christ!

And I know that God delights in this, in seeing his Son loved and petitioned. I beg him to give thousands of people the grace to follow the saints who, with only these paltry means, have time and again convinced God to snatch the Church from the jaws of death.

The prayer from my hopeless lips and broken heart is without human support and the consequences cannot be verified or known, not even by the one who prays. They are ephemeral, a wisp in the wind. I am transformed — reformed — one day only to be confounded the next by an unexpected crisis, more bad news. Does my fractured prayer influence the world? I strive to go on as all seems lost and hopeless, a great waste.

Still, I cannot simply fold up the newspaper, do my 9-to-5, and climb back aboard the commuter train for the evening trip home. I resolve each day never to quit, never to rest on the sidelines.

Like a baby who can only reach for its mother's face, I grope in that church to clear my mind and make some kind of plea. Halting and distracted though I am, my suffering opens God's heart. It unleashes mercy. St. Faustina said that, from the tabernacle, “rays of mercy” go out to the whole world every time a person adores this sacrament. Prayer is made grand and wonderful — perfect, really — because it starts out so little, so uncertain, so tentative in my poor hands.

The baby does not know what a mother is or why this special person draws close. But the child still seeks to make contact, to draw even closer. By doing so, the infant experiences its utter helplessness, its total dependence on the loving parent who inspires love. Wordlessly, because he has no words, the child touches her. Though fleeting, that touch changes everything.

Joe Cullen, a former Register editor, writes from New York.