The Anima Christi

The prayer works through Christ one part at a time. Soul. Body. Blood. The water from the pierced side. The passion. Each one is handed a verb and told to act. Sanctify. Save. Wash. Strengthen. Nothing here is being described or admired. Every line is a command in the mouth of someone who has run out of politeness.

Halfway down, the direction changes. The prayer stops naming parts of Christ and starts naming what it is afraid of. Hide me. Do not let me be separated. Defend me. Call me at the hour of my death. A prayer that opens at an altar closes at a bedside, and the whole turn happens inside eighty English words.

That shape explains why it survived. It is usable by a healthy person after Mass and by a frightened one at three in the morning, without changing a syllable.

Sanguis Christi, inebria me is the line that stops English readers cold. Inebriate now means drunk, and a prayer asking for that sounds like a mistranslation or a joke. It is neither. The word comes straight out of the Latin Bible the author had been reading since childhood.

In the Vulgate, Psalm 22 closes its table scene with calix meus inebrians. The King James Bible renders that same line as my cup runneth over. Psalm 35 in the Vulgate has inebriabuntur ab ubertate domus tuae, about people filled from the abundance of God's house. Overflow is the whole of what the word means there.

So the fourth line asks to be filled past the brim. Some newer translations say fill me, some say make me drunk with love, and both are after that same overflow. The old English prayer books kept inebriate, most people meet the word there, and the prayer picks up a reputation for strangeness it did not earn.

The Anima Christi dates from the first half of the fourteenth century. Pope John XXII attached indulgences to it in 1330. The hymnologist James Mearns found it in a British Museum manuscript from around 1370, and a prayer book that belonged to Cardinal Peter de Luxembourg, who died in 1387, carries it in almost exactly the form used today. It was also cut into one of the gates of the Alcazar of Seville, which puts it in Spain in the reign of Pedro the Cruel.

John XXII is the only name ever seriously floated. The 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia allows that he may have written it and warns you off in the same paragraph, because that pope was handed credit for several devotional texts he did not compose, and the man who grants an indulgence is easy to confuse with the man who wrote the words being indulged. No attribution has ever settled. Treat the prayer as anonymous.

Ignatius of Loyola was born in 1491, more than a century after the text was already circulating in manuscript. He could not have written it, and the 1907 encyclopedia says so plainly. The attribution survives anyway, because of where printers put it.

Open the text of the Spiritual Exercises and you find something better than authorship. Ignatius prescribes the Anima Christi four times and never once writes it out. It first appears in the third exercise of the opening week: ask Our Lady for grace and say a Hail Mary, ask the Son and say an Anima Christi, ask the Father and say an Our Father. That triple colloquy comes back in the Two Standards.

It appears twice more, in his second method of prayer and again in his third, listed beside the Hail Mary, the Creed, and the Salve Regina. He treats it the way you would treat a phone number you have known for twenty years. The first edition only names the prayer, because he assumed the reader already had it by heart. Later editions printed the words in full, and readers took everything in the book for his.

His third method is worth trying on this text. Say one word between each breath, and give that breath to what the word means, or to the person the prayer is addressed to, or to the distance between his greatness and your own smallness. Those three are his own categories. At that pace thirteen lines is slow work.

If that is too much, use his second method instead. His rule there is to stay on one word for as long as it keeps yielding something, even if the hour ends on that word. Passio Christi, conforta me will carry a person through an evening.

Here is the Latin as printed in the Raccolta, the Roman collection of indulgenced prayers, in its 1857 English edition.

Anima Christi, sanctifica me. Corpus Christi, salva me. Sanguis Christi, inebria me. Aqua lateris Christi, lava me. Passio Christi, conforta me. O bone Jesu, exaudi me. Intra tua vulnera, absconde me. Ne permittas me separari a Te. Ab hoste maligno defende me. In hora mortis meae voca me, et jube me venire ad Te, ut cum Sanctis tuis laudem Te in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

That same 1857 volume prints an English version in rhyme. Its preface credits the translation only to a very dear friend of the translator. The friend was John Henry Newman, who printed the same verses in his Meditations and Devotions under the heading Anima Christi, translated, with a footnote dating them to about 1854.

Soul of Christ, be my sanctification; Body of Christ, be my salvation; Blood of Christ, fill all my veins; Water of Christ's side, wash out my stains; Passion of Christ, my comfort be; O good Jesu, listen to me; In Thy wounds I fain would hide, Ne'er to be parted from Thy side; Guard me, should the foe assail me; Call me when my life shall fail me; Bid me come to Thee above, With Thy saints to sing Thy love, World without end. Amen.

The plain version at the top of this page comes from a prayer book printed in New York in 1888 for the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, which headed it a favorite prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola and put an exclamation point on almost every line. Both English texts are old enough to be free of copyright. Most versions in a modern missal or hymnal are not, which is why the wording shifts every time you look it up.

If you came here for lyrics and none of this matches, you are probably after a hymn. Soul of my Saviour is a mid nineteenth century verse translation of the same Latin that reached dozens of English hymnals, and hymnals disagree about who made it. Composers have kept writing new settings with new translations ever since.

The Raccolta files the prayer under a heading that tells you how it was used: invocations to be said after Mass, or Communion, or any other time. The grant printed above it came from Pius IX by a decree of 9 January 1854, which revoked every earlier grant for this prayer and replaced them with a new one. That is why old prayer books show figures like three hundred days beside the text.

Those figures never meant days struck off a sentence somewhere. Catholic teaching defines an indulgence as the remission of temporal punishment for sin whose guilt is already forgiven, and current practice calls an indulgence partial or plenary without counting anything in days. If a nineteenth century prayer book has confused you, that is the reason.

The last four lines are why people reach for this prayer when someone is close to death. In the hour of my death, call me was written to be said out loud by the person who will need it, in advance, while there is still breath to say it with. You do not have to be dying to mean it. Most people who pray it are practicing.

What is on this page is the text and its history. It is not spiritual direction, and the AI on this site is not a priest. It cannot hear a confession, give absolution, anoint anyone, or stand in for any sacrament. If someone is near death and asking for a priest, call one.

The Anima Christi grew up inside Catholic practice, and it is honest to say so. It is also addressed to Christ from the first word to the last. No saint is invoked in it and nobody is asked to carry the request along. Heinrich Schutz set it in German as Die Seele Christi heilige mich, catalogued SWV 325, and Johann Theile set it as well.

Two things in it do belong to a particular tradition. The prayer assumes the real presence of Christ in the eucharist, so Body of Christ, save me is doing specific work in the mouth of someone who has just received it. And the indulgences attached to it since 1330 come from a system most Protestant churches rejected in the sixteenth century and still reject.

Christians who do not hold those commitments pray it anyway, taking it as what it says on the page: a request to be washed, guarded, and called by name at the end. If your own church has a position on this, that position is worth more than anything a website tells you.