Dear Carol:

I can appreciate your dilemma. There is indeed a different worldview between Catholicism and Pentecostalism. I would advise being truthful, but tactful in responding to your mother. It sounds like she is sincere and is wanting to get closer to God.

As to your questions...

1) God does not NEED us for anything let alone to "release His power or distribute His blessings". Rather, God desires our participation. We are a family and God is our Father. A Father wants his children to come to him for their needs and wants. A Father is pleased when he sees his children interceding for each other. Intercession is a kindly act opposed to a selfish desire. A Father also respects the fact that his children make their own choices and is pleased when they choose to come to him (in prayer).

God does not NEED us to pray, but He wants us to pray, to participate with Him in the family like good siblings helping each other before the Father.

The great Protestant preacher and theologian Charles Spurgeon said it well:

"I commend intercessory prayer, because it opens man's soul, gives a healthy play to his sympathies, constrains him to feel that he is not everybody, and that this wide world and this great universe were not after all made that he might be its petty lord, that everything might bend to his will, and all creatures crouch at his feet."

2) In the Spiritual Warfare apostolate we pray (intercede) for our clients before God asking God to deliver them from evil and to heal them from affliction. The prayers in our SW Prayer Catalog linked below are examples of those prayers.

3) The idea of "travailing (birthing) prayer" comes from Galatians 4:19 which in the King James Version reads: "My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you"...

I believe what the Pentecostals are thinking here is, to quote from one of their websites:

...we need to move from casual prayer to intense prayer...it’s not just “prayer” that does good, but fervent, intense prayer from someone in right standing with God. 

When done the right way, under the power of the Holy Spirit, this type of prayer takes on the look and feel of a woman travailing in child birth.  This type of prayer takes time, it takes focus and intensity, it takes labor.  I have heard it once said that, “Prayer IS the Work.” 

They are taking this verse an applying a principle they see in the verse.

Here is the commentary on that verse from the Navarre Bible Commentary, one of the best Catholic commentaries around:

St. Paul speaks full of affection: the Galatians are running the risk of cutting themselves off from faith in Christ, which he had brought to them; and this makes him feel birth-pains all over again, because he has to start to re-confirm their faith. ... he is speaking to them from his heart, like a mother or father: he will continue to suffer, because they need to hear the Gospel again "until Christ be formed" in them, just as a child takes shape in its mother's womb.

Any parent knows this feeling. We have taught our children well and sacrificed for them. Then they act as if they have never been taught a thing. We then "suffer the pains" to re-teach them what we have already taught them. That is what St. Paul is talking about.

They are saying that we sometimes have to involve ourselves in an intense sacrificial prayer for others, a kind of prayer that may be for us like the birth pangs of a mother.

This is quite a stretch from this verse, but the concept they propose is sound.

The idea of "standing in the gap" also comes from Scripture. Ezekiel 22 says: "So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one" (NKJV). The prophet Ezekiel is here expressing the need for prayer intercessors who would “stand in the gap” before God in behalf of the needs of His people of that time.

Moses (Ex 32) stepped in when God was angry, standing in the gap in the most literal sense: offering his own life for that of his nation. There are many other examples.

In otherwords, "standing in the gap" is intercessory prayer of a personal and bold kind.

The idea of "praying Scripture" is using scripture verses in prayer. We do that all the time. The first part of the Rosary is a quotation of Scripture. Many Litanies we pray are actually scripture. Praying scripture, praying back the Word of God is very effective. Afterall the words of our prayer in this case are God's words, not ours.

All of these concepts we do as Catholics. The Pentecostals and other Protestants just like to be catchy titles to these notions.

As for books on Intercessory Prayer, the entire Catholic Church is a book on intercessory prayer. We have a dogma on the topic -- the Dogma on the Communion of the Saints. There are thousands of books on the subject. Hundreds of books by the saints on prayer. Just pick a saint and there will probably be a book that saint has written on prayer.

Intercessory prayer is praying on behalf of others. There is a book in a sentence. For a extended definition, here is the Catholic Encyclopedia.

I don't know of any books "about" intercessory prayer. We Catholics spend little time talking "about" it and rather spend time "doing" it. Every book on Catholic Prayer that you will find contains Intercessory prayers.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary