Prayers
54 prayers of the Catholic tradition, in English, with a note on each saying what it is and when people pray it. Search by name, by another name for the same prayer, or by what you are actually facing.
Try a name like Memorare, another name for the same prayer like Salve Regina, or simply grief or before surgery.
7 prayers
Essential Prayers
The prayers the Church puts first, and the ones assumed by every other prayer here.
- The Sign of the Cross2 forms
The gesture and words that open and close nearly every Catholic prayer. Eight words, and the shortest statement of what Christians believe about God.
- The Our Father2 forms
The prayer Christ himself gave when his disciples asked how to pray. The Church calls it the summary of the whole Gospel — if you learn one prayer, it is this one.
- The Hail Mary2 forms
Two greetings from the Gospel — the angel’s and Elizabeth’s — followed by the Church’s own petition. The prayer the Rosary is built from.
- The Glory Be2 forms
A single sentence of praise to the Trinity, prayed at the end of each decade of the Rosary and between the psalms. The oldest form of Christian prayer still in daily use.
- The Apostles’ Creed
The ancient baptismal creed of the Church in Rome — what a person professes before being baptised. Prayed at the start of the Rosary.
- The Acts of Faith, Hope and Love
Three short prayers naming the three theological virtues, traditionally prayed together — and traditionally the prayers a Catholic makes when in danger or near death.
- Pray the Rosary4 forms
Not a single prayer but a method: the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be arranged around twenty scenes from the life of Christ. The order of the prayers, the mysteries for each day, the two prayers belonging to the Rosary alone, and the older Dominican form.
Daily Prayers
Prayers with a time attached to them — waking, eating, evening, the turning of the day.
Prayers to Our Lady
Prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Rosary is listed under Essential Prayers.
About these texts
Every prayer here is a received text of the Catholic tradition, reproduced from published sources that are named on each prayer's own page. None of them were written by us, and none have been reworded.
Where a prayer has a modern wording still under copyright — the Mass texts belonging to the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, for instance — we publish the older traditional wording instead and say so on the page. GraceBook is not a publisher of liturgical books, and nothing here should be taken as the text to be used in the liturgy.
Scripture passages are from the Douay-Rheims Bible in the Challoner revision. If you find an error in any text, tell us and we will correct it.