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
Prayers to the Saints
Asking particular saints and angels to pray with you and for you.
Prayers in Hard Times
For illness, fear, grief and the stretches where prayer is difficult.
- Psalm 23 — The Lord Is My Shepherd
The psalm read at nearly every Catholic funeral, and worth knowing long before then. It does not promise the valley will be avoided — only that one is not alone in it.
- Let Nothing Trouble You2 forms
Nine lines found written in St. Teresa of Ávila’s breviary after her death. The shortest useful answer in the tradition to being afraid.
- Prayer of Abandonment
Written by Blessed Charles de Foucauld, who spent fifteen years in the Sahara with almost nothing to show for it. For the stretches when a person has genuinely run out of plans.
- Prayer in Time of Sickness
For a person who is ill themselves. It asks for healing plainly, and then asks for something harder in case healing is not what comes.
- Lead, Kindly Light
Written by Newman in 1833, becalmed on a boat off Sicily and unable to get home. Its request is deliberately small: not to see the distance, only the next step.
Discernment and Guidance
For anyone trying to work out what they are being asked to do.
- Prayer of Abandonment
Written by Blessed Charles de Foucauld, who spent fifteen years in the Sahara with almost nothing to show for it. For the stretches when a person has genuinely run out of plans.
- Lead, Kindly Light
Written by Newman in 1833, becalmed on a boat off Sicily and unable to get home. Its request is deliberately small: not to see the distance, only the next step.
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.