Catholic Short Prayers

Catholic Short Prayers is a tiny prayer-book app made by an indie developer named Leonard Mamangkey. It does one thing: keeps a list of short Catholic prayers in your pocket so you have something ready when you need a few seconds with God.

The prayer list runs the usual ground — Sign of the Cross, Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, Apostles Creed — and then keeps going into shorter aspirations: prayers to the Sacred Heart, prayers to the Holy Spirit, brief offerings, short prayers to Jesus and Mary. You can set a daily reminder. You can set a location-based reminder so that the prayer pops up when you arrive somewhere specific. Shake the phone and you get a random prayer.

What I appreciate is the smallness of it. Most of these prayers fit in a single screen. That is the point. Praying without ceasing, as Paul puts it, is not about long sessions; it is about turning the heart upward many times a day. An app that puts a half-dozen lines of the Sacred Heart prayer in front of you while you wait at a red light is doing real work.

Good for people building a habit of short prayer, commuters, hospital visitors, anyone who finds long apps overwhelming. Also good for kids and teens learning the traditional Catholic prayers — the wording is the standard Catholic phrasing, not a paraphrase.

It is not a Rosary app and not a Liturgy of the Hours app. The interface is dated — the developer has not pushed an update in years — and the app has the look of something built in 2014. There are no audio recordings.

$2.99, by Leonard Mamangkey. Available on the App Store: Catholic Short Prayers. Old but honest, and the kind of small tool that earns its keep.