The Desert Fathers and Modern-Day Heretics

When I pray for my friends with whom I disagree about worldly things, I never pray for them to change their political opinions. To do so would be.a degradation of prayer. Who am I to say what someone else's political opinions should be, unless they should invite me to help shape them?

Even if they themselves should open up a critique of my own opinions, at my invitation or otherwise, to me this is not an invitation for me to render my own critique of theirs, although one could argue that it is possible to take it as permission to do so without loss of honor.

There are stronger considerations in my motivations than even honor. These include the very difficult striving for humility, which according to one early Desert Father, is the one virtue that the demonic cannot counterfeit.

I could imagine praying for people I know to be liberated from certain possessions---not demonic possessions, as I am not qualified to judge that. Rather I mean possessions of mind. According to one latter-day Protestant writer who is not rarely cited as a Christian authority by Catholic priests, demons rarely need to possess us directly these days. In the Modern era we choose most of our possessions by own our will, without the assistance of the demonic.

These possessions I may judge to have taken hold in other people I know, and for which I might wish for them to be liberated, are ones I see active in them by using my own faculties, which are highly fallible. So when it comes to individuals, I must tread lightly here, and very rarely pray for this kind of thing directly. In the case of individuals, one should probably strive to limit oneself to the most basic principles of charity by praying for their health, joy, peace, and salvation.

When might I pray for liberation from possession? I might do so in the case of nations (a concept endorsed by God throughout Scripture), on which level judgments of possession are arguably more legitimately made (but probably only for one's own nation, or a nation in which one has spent substantial time).