Prayers for Mercy
"Lord, have mercy" may be the shortest complete prayer in Christian use, and it has never worn out. These prayers ask for God's compassion on yourself, on someone you love, and on the world.
Mercy in Scripture is not reluctant. It is God's disposition. These prayers are written from that confidence rather than from anxiety about whether you will be heard.
48 prayers
- A General Confession
Cranmer's general confession from the Book of Common Prayer (1552), said daily at Morning and Evening Prayer by Anglicans for nearly five…
- Abraham's Intercession for Sodom
Abraham bargains with God for a city that deserves nothing, going down from fifty righteous men to ten. It is the Bible's first sustained…
- Act of Oblation to Merciful Love (St. Thérèse of Lisieux)
Thérèse made this offering on 9 June 1895, the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, and copied it into her notebook; it is the theological heart…
- Consecration to the Divine Mercy
Taken from the Diary of St. Faustina Kowalska (entry 1570), written in Poland in the 1930s and published after the Second World War. Pope…
- Daniel's Prayer of Confession
Daniel, reading Jeremiah in exile, sets his face to seek God with fasting and confesses on behalf of his nation: 'we do not present our…
- Eternal Rest (Requiem Aeternam)
The Requiem Aeternam is the oldest and shortest prayer for the dead in the Western Church, drawn from the fourth book of Esdras and used in…
- Help Me, O Lord, to Be Merciful (St. Faustina)
A prayer from Faustina's Diary in which she asks for mercy in each part of her body, one sense at a time. It has become a standard…
- Jonah's Prayer from the Depths
Prayed from inside the great fish (Jonah 2:2–9), this is Scripture's clearest prayer of someone who ran from God and was rescued anyway.…
- Late Have I Loved You (St. Augustine)
From Book X of Augustine's Confessions, written around 400, this is the most quoted passage in Western Christian spirituality. It is the…
- Litany of the Most Precious Blood
Approved by Pope St. John XXIII in 1960, who had a lifelong devotion to the Precious Blood and wished the litany prayed throughout the…
- Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Approved for public use by Pope Leo XIII in 1899, the year he consecrated the whole human race to the Sacred Heart, this litany draws its…
- Novena for the Faithful Departed
Praying for the dead is one of the oldest documented Christian practices, attested in the catacombs and in the liturgies of both East and…
- Novena to the Divine Mercy
St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), a Polish religious sister, recorded in her Diary the nine daily intentions Our Lord asked her to…
- O Blood and Water (St. Faustina)
Recorded in the Diary of St. Faustina Kowalska (1930s). It became a foundation of the Divine Mercy devotion and is prayed daily by many…
- Prayer for Forgiveness of Self
A modern prayer for the scrupulous and the self-condemning, built on Romans 8:1. The Christian tradition distinguishes godly sorrow, which…
- Prayer for Mercy on the Whole World (St. Faustina)
From the Diary of St. Faustina Kowalska, and printed as the concluding prayer of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. Faustina's Polish text was…
- Prayer for the Church (St. Catherine of Siena)
Catherine of Siena spent her short life pleading with popes and cardinals for the reform of a divided Church, and her Dialogue and letters…
- Prayer for the Departed (Memory Eternal)
The central prayer of the Orthodox Trisagion service for the dead and of the Panikhida, sung at funerals, memorial days, and on the…
- Prayer for the Poor (St. Vincent de Paul)
St. Vincent de Paul (1581–1660) organised charity for the poor of France on a scale no one had attempted, and taught the Daughters of…
- Prayer for the Souls in Purgatory
Prayer for the dead is one of the oldest Christian practices, attested in the catacombs and defended in 2 Maccabees 12:46 — 'it is a holy…
- Prayer of a Penitent Heart (Psalm 103)
Drawn from Psalm 103, the great psalm of David on the mercy of God. Where Psalm 51 is the cry of the sinner, Psalm 103 is the answer:…
- Prayer of Forgiveness for Family Wounds
A modern prayer of intergenerational forgiveness, drawing on Psalm 68:6 and the biblical theme that both blessing and sin travel through…
- Prayer of St. Gregory of Narek
St. Gregory of Narek (951–1003), an Armenian monk declared a Doctor of the Church in 2015, wrote the Book of Lamentations — ninety-five…
- Prayer of St. Isaac the Syrian for Mercy on All
From the Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian (seventh century), a hermit-bishop of the Church of the East whose writings became…
- Prayer of the Desert Fathers
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers record that when Abba Macarius was asked how to pray, he taught these few sentences and warned against…
- Prayer to Be Freed from Evil Habits
A prayer for habitual sin, the ordinary battleground of the Christian life and, in Catholic teaching, the most common way a person hands…
- Prayer to Forgive Those Who Have Wronged Me
A modern prayer of release built directly on the words of Christ from the Cross (Luke 23:34) and the petition of the Our Father.…
- Prayer to Remove Generational Spirits
A prayer addressing what deliverance ministers call generational or ancestral influence — the observation, found in Exodus 20:5 and Exodus…
- Prayer to St. Paul (St. Anselm of Canterbury)
From the Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm (c. 1070), addressed to St. Paul and famous for its maternal imagery of Christ — language…
- Prayer to the Precious Blood for Protection
Devotion to the Precious Blood was promoted by St. Gaspar del Bufalo, who founded the Missionaries of the Precious Blood in 1815, and Pope…
- Psalm 103 — Bless the Lord, O My Soul
A psalm of David and one of Scripture's fullest meditations on divine mercy. It is prayed daily at Orthodox Matins as one of the "Typica"…
- Psalm 130 — Out of the Depths (De Profundis)
The De Profundis is one of the seven Penitential Psalms and has been prayed for the dead and by the desperate since the earliest centuries…
- Psalm 51 — Have Mercy on Me, O God
Psalm 51, the Miserere, is traditionally ascribed to King David after the prophet Nathan confronted him over Bathsheba and Uriah. It is the…
- Psalm 86 — Bow Down Thine Ear, O Lord, Hear Me
A plain, unadorned cry of a poor and needy servant, weaving together lines from across the psalter. Its request for an 'undivided heart'…
- Purification Prayer
A prayer of interior cleansing, prayed after confession or as a daily discipline. Its logic is the standard Catholic teaching that the…
- St. Gertrude Prayer for the Holy Souls
Attributed to St. Gertrude the Great in Catholic devotional tradition. It is prayed as an act of intercession for the dead, and often as a…
- Stations of the Cross: Opening Prayer
The opening and the versicle used at each of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, a devotion carried from Jerusalem to Europe by the…
- The Act of Hope
The second of the three traditional Acts, the Act of Hope names precisely what a Christian is entitled to expect: forgiveness, grace to…
- The Chaplet of Divine Mercy
The Chaplet of Divine Mercy was given, according to her diary, to St. Faustina Kowalska, a Polish sister, in 1935, and spread worldwide…
- The Chaplet of the Holy Face of Jesus
The devotion to the Holy Face grew from the visions of the Carmelite Sr. Marie of St. Peter (1816–1848) in Tours, France, and was later…
- The Confiteor (I Confess)
The Confiteor is the general confession of the Penitential Act at the beginning of Mass, in use in some form since the Carolingian era and…
- The Fatima Prayer
According to the memoirs of Sister Lúcia, the Virgin Mary taught this prayer to the shepherd children at Fátima on July 13, 1917. It is now…
- The Jesus Prayer
The Jesus Prayer is the heart of the Eastern Christian tradition of hesychasm, or prayer of stillness. Its roots reach back to the Desert…
- The Kyrie Eleison (Threefold Plea for Mercy)
The oldest surviving Greek text in the Latin liturgy, attested in Christian worship from at least the fourth century and likely older.…
- The Prayer of the Thief on the Cross
'Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.' The one deathbed conversion in the Gospels, prayed in Orthodox liturgy before…
- The Publican's Prayer
From the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14), where Jesus says it was the publican, not the religious man, who…
- The Trisagion (Thrice-Holy Hymn)
One of the oldest fixed prayers of the Eastern Church, sung at nearly every Orthodox service since the fifth century and included in the…
- The Twenty-Four Prayers of St. John Chrysostom
Attributed to St. John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), these twenty-four petitions are prayed one for each hour of the day and night, and appear…