PRAYER is an invitation to a personal relationship with God. In fact,
…prayer is the living relationship of the children of God with their Father… —Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), n.2565
But here, we must be careful that we do not consciously or unconsciously begin to view our salvation as merely a personal matter. There is also the temptation to flee the world (contemptus mundi), hiding until the Storm passes, all the while others perish for lack of a light to guide them in their own darkness. It is precisely these individualistic views which dominate modern Christianity, even within fervent Catholic circles, and has led the Holy Father to address it in his latest encyclical:
How could the idea have developed that Jesus’s message is narrowly individualistic and aimed only at each person singly? How did we arrive at this interpretation of the “salvation of the soul” as a flight from responsibility for the whole, and how did we come to conceive the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others? —POPE BENEDICT XVI, Spe Salvi (Saved In Hope), n. 16