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.
5 prayers
Sorrow and Mercy
Prayers of repentance, and what to pray before and after Confession.
Mass and the Eucharist
Prayers before and after Communion, before the Blessed Sacrament, and before a crucifix.
- Soul of Christ2 forms
A fourteenth-century prayer said after Communion, and the prayer St. Ignatius placed at the front of the Spiritual Exercises. Short enough to have by heart within a week.
- Act of Spiritual Communion
For anyone who cannot receive Communion — through illness, distance, or because they are not able to receive at present. St. Alphonsus Liguori’s words, and the ones most used.
- The Divine Praises
Said after Benediction. Written in the eighteenth century as reparation for blasphemy — which is why every line begins with "Blessed be".
- Down in Adoration Falling2 forms
The last two verses of St. Thomas Aquinas’s hymn for Corpus Christi, sung at Benediction while the Blessed Sacrament is incensed.
- Prayer Before a Crucifix
Prayed kneeling before a crucifix, traditionally after Communion on a Friday. It asks for the one thing that cannot be manufactured: real sorrow and real amendment.
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.