Your thoughts on a poem?

This is behind f-lock as a precaution because I'm teaching it at the moment, but it's not just the students whose interpretations aren't matching mine at the moment. The poem is Carol Ann Duffy's 'Prayer':

( below the cut )

(The 'radio's prayer', if you're unfamiliar with the names, is the BBC late-night shipping forecast.)

Many of my students, and several of the other TAs, read the 'prayers' talked about here - the ones uttering themselves - as actual prayers spoken/thought by those individuals, even if subconsciously. So the birds singing in the tree, the Latin chanting of the train, and so on, are then answers to the prayers. I read it the other way around: the people aren't praying, but the sounds they hear are still 'prayers'. I'm curious because the only TA who read it the same way I did the first time round is Catholic (as am I, and as is the poet) - is it a Catholic thing, with Catholics typically having more of a concept of communal, ritualised prayer than Protestants?