Prayer Library

The classic prayer to one's guardian angel, asking for guidance, protection, and light on the path of life.

An inspiring prayer seeking to be an instrument of God's peace, attributed to the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi.

St. Francis of Assisi

Catholic prayer for the conversion of a loved one is grounded in one of the great pastoral testimonies of Christian history: the long, faithful prayer of St. Monica for her son Augustine. Monica prayed for her son's conversion through years of his pursuit of Manichaean philosophy, through his moral wandering in Carthage and Rome, through her own tears and the counsel she received from St. Ambrose of Milan ('It is not possible that the son of these tears should perish'). Augustine was baptized in 387 at the age of thirty-three; Monica died shortly after in Ostia, having lived to see what she had asked. Augustine recorded her perseverance in his Confessions (Book IX), one of the most-read spiritual autobiographies in the Western tradition. The pastoral testimony Monica embodies is not a guarantee of result — Augustine's conversion happened in God's time, not Monica's — but a posture of unbroken faithfulness: that the believer's prayer for a loved one is itself a grace, a participation in God's own desire for that soul, regardless of when or whether the prayer is visibly answered. This prayer is appropriate for: a spouse who has stopped practicing the faith; an adult child who has left the Church; a parent who has never been baptized; a friend whose interior journey toward Christ seems stalled or backwards-moving; anyone whose conversion the petitioner experiences as an open wound. It is also appropriate as a daily prayer for the long arc — Monica's seventeen years of prayer for Augustine is not a literal mandate, but a reminder that this kind of intercession is meant to be sustained, not sprinted.

St. Monica

A prayer asking the Holy Spirit for clarity and guidance in making an important life decision.

Catholic prayer for expectant mothers draws on the Church's centuries-old tradition of accompanying women through pregnancy under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who carried Christ in her own womb for nine months. The principal scriptural foundation is the Visitation (Luke 1:39-56): Mary, herself in the early months of pregnancy with Jesus, hastens into the hill country of Judea to be with her cousin Elizabeth, who is in her sixth month with John the Baptist. The Magnificat ('My soul magnifies the Lord…') is Mary's prayer of two pregnant women rejoicing together. The Catholic devotional tradition has long entrusted expectant mothers to Mary under several specific titles: Our Lady of the Expectation (the Solemnity of December 18, a Spanish-tradition feast nine days before Christmas, marking Mary's own approaching delivery); Our Lady of Guadalupe (whose image shows her pregnant, wearing the maternity sash of indigenous Mexican custom); and St. Gerard Majella (1726-1755), an Italian Redemptorist lay brother whose name has become so associated with safe delivery that statues of him are placed in maternity wards in Catholic hospitals around the world. The prayer for expectant mothers is appropriate at every stage of pregnancy: at the first positive test, through the first-trimester anxiety many mothers feel, during the long middle months of waiting, in the weeks of nesting before delivery, during labor itself (when family members often pray it at the bedside), and immediately after delivery in thanksgiving. It is also prayed by communities — parishes, prayer groups, the woman's circle of friends — as a way of surrounding her with intercession through nine months of waiting that mirror Mary's own.

Our Lady

A simple, heartfelt prayer asking God for physical and spiritual healing, suitable for any illness or suffering.

The Prayer for Safe Travel is one of the most-frequently-prayed short prayers in everyday Catholic life. The Catholic tradition recognizes the journey — whether across town, across the country, or across the world — as a particular moment of spiritual vulnerability: travelers leave behind the rhythms of home, are exposed to dangers seen and unseen, and are often outside the immediate companionship of family. Catholic prayer for safe travel has been part of the Church's daily life since at least the early medieval period — the Itinerarium ('Travel Prayer') prayed before any significant departure, the blessing of new vehicles (cars, ships, airplanes) on St. Christopher's feast, the carrying of a St. Christopher medal in cars and luggage. The contemporary practice includes praying before any long-distance trip, at the start of a road journey, before boarding a plane, before a military deployment, or before a pilgrimage. The prayer is especially associated with St. Christopher (patron of travelers — see the dedicated novena), with St. Raphael the Archangel (companion of Tobias on his long journey in the book of Tobit and patron of travelers in Catholic tradition), and with the Guardian Angel devotion (each Catholic's guardian angel is the traveling companion par excellence). For families with members in military service, in commercial transportation careers (truck drivers, airline crews, mariners), or with frequent travel obligations, the prayer is a daily fixture of Catholic life.

St. Christopher

The Prayer for a Happy Death is one of the most traditional Catholic prayers in the entire devotional tradition. The Catholic theological category of 'happy death' (Latin: bona mors) is not about the absence of physical suffering — it is about dying in the state of grace, fortified by the sacraments of the Church, accompanied by prayer, and entrusted to God's mercy. The contemporary Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 1014 quotes the medieval Catholic prayer 'From a sudden and unprovided death, deliver us, O Lord' — the desire is not to live longer but to die well. Catholic tradition has developed many specific prayers for a happy death, often associated with St. Joseph (patron of the dying, in tradition because he died in the arms of Jesus and Mary), with St. Camillus de Lellis (the founder of the Camillians, who specifically ministered to the dying), and with Our Lady of Sorrows (the Marian title most associated with end-of-life accompaniment). The prayer is appropriate to pray for oneself (as a habitual lifelong intention) and for others (most often for an elderly loved one, for someone with a terminal diagnosis, or for the soul of someone who has recently died). Many Catholic devotional traditions recommend praying for a happy death daily as a kind of memento mori discipline — the deliberate remembering that one will die, which deepens daily Catholic practice.

St. Joseph (Patron of a Happy Death)

A prayer for married couples experiencing difficulty, asking God to strengthen the bond of love and restore unity.

Holy Family

A prayer for couples struggling with infertility, asking God through the intercession of Sts. Joachim and Anne for the gift of new life.

Sts. Joachim and Anne

A prayer asking God's providence in times of financial difficulty, trusting in the One who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field.

St. Joseph the Worker

The Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel was composed by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 after, according to long-attested tradition, the Pope had a sudden mystical experience while celebrating Mass — a kind of waking vision in which he overheard a colloquy between Christ and Satan in which Satan boasted he could destroy the Church if granted enough time and power. Shaken by what he had seen, Leo XIII composed the prayer to St. Michael that same day and ordered it added to the prayers said by the priest and faithful at the end of every Low Mass throughout the universal Church. This practice — the 'Leonine Prayers' after Mass — continued for nearly eighty years until the liturgical reforms of the 1960s. The St. Michael prayer was not abolished but its formal place in the post-Mass prayers was lapsed. Pope St. John Paul II revived the prayer's prominence in a 1994 Sunday Angelus address, in which he urged the faithful to 'not forget to recite' the St. Michael prayer 'to obtain help in the battle against the forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world.' The prayer's text draws on Jude 1:9 (Michael disputing with the devil over the body of Moses), Revelation 12:7-9 (Michael casting down the dragon), and the broader Catholic tradition of St. Michael as the leader of the heavenly host against the powers of evil. The prayer is appropriate for: spiritual warfare in any form, anxiety about evil in the world or in personal life, protection during travel or before a difficult encounter, the conversion of those who have fallen into serious sin, and as a daily prayer of consecration to St. Michael's protection. It is the prayer most commonly taught to Catholic children as a first 'protection prayer' alongside the Guardian Angel Prayer.

St. Michael the Archangel

The Salve Regina — known in English as 'Hail Holy Queen' — is one of the four Marian antiphons of the Roman Breviary and the most beloved short Marian prayer in the Latin Church. It is traditionally attributed to Blessed Hermann the Lame of Reichenau (1013-1054), a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Reichenau in southern Germany. Hermann was born with severe physical disabilities — likely cerebral palsy or a similar condition — which left him unable to walk, with difficulty speaking, and partially deaf. From early childhood he lived at the abbey, where the monks recognized his extraordinary intellectual gifts: he wrote treatises on astronomy, music theory, and mathematics, composed liturgical hymns, and (per the eleventh-century tradition) composed the Salve Regina near the end of his life. The prayer's tenderness — addressing Mary as 'our life, our sweetness, and our hope' — and its honest acknowledgment of human suffering ('mourning and weeping in this vale of tears') reflect the experience of a man who had known a life of unusual physical limitation and who had learned to find consolation in Marian intercession. The Salve Regina entered universal Catholic use through the Cistercian Order in the twelfth century (St. Bernard of Clairvaux was a particular advocate) and was adopted as the closing antiphon of Compline during the Saturday-evening-to-Saturday liturgical week from Trinity Sunday through Advent — that is, for most of the liturgical year. After the Council of Trent it became the closing prayer of the Holy Rosary in the Dominican tradition (and through the Dominicans, in all of Latin Catholicism). It is also one of the prayers the Catholic Church grants a partial indulgence for (Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, 17). The prayer is appropriate for: the close of every Holy Rosary; nightly recitation as part of Compline or as a final family prayer before bed; at the bedside of the dying (the Salve Regina is one of the traditional 'commendation of the soul' prayers); during seasons of personal suffering or family crisis; on Marian feasts and during the Marian months of May and October; and as the prayer Catholics learn first as 'the Catholic way of taking refuge in Mary' alongside the Memorare.

Blessed Hermann the Lame of Reichenau (attributed author)

A widely loved prayer asking God for the grace to accept what we cannot change, courage to change what we can, and wisdom to know the difference.

The Memorare is a brief but extraordinarily powerful prayer of confidence in the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It takes its name from its opening Latin word, Memorare ('Remember'), and is attributed in its modern form to Fr. Claude Bernard, a 17th-century French priest known as 'the Poor Priest' for his apostolate to prisoners and the dying. The prayer was popularized through Fr. Bernard's distribution of more than 200,000 leaflets in pre-Revolution Paris, though its devotional roots reach further back — likely to a longer prayer attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), the great Cistercian abbot and Doctor of the Church whose Marian devotion shaped Western piety. The prayer's structure is a confident appeal: it acknowledges Mary's universal maternity (O Virgin of virgins, my mother), references the unbroken tradition of her intercession (never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection… was left unaided), and concludes with a humble petition (in thy mercy hear and answer me). Saints across the centuries have testified to its power: Mother Teresa of Calcutta prayed nine consecutive Memorares daily — what she called her 'flying novena' — when she needed something quickly. The Memorare is the Catholic prayer of last resort, prayed in moments of acute need, at the bedside of the dying, in the chapel before a difficult conversation, or whispered as a parent waits for word from a hospital room.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux