The Memorare

Memorare is a Latin imperative meaning remember, and Latin prayers usually take their name from the word they open with. People sometimes ask whether that word implies Mary has forgotten something. It does not. The reminder does its work on the person saying it, who is talking themselves back into confidence at the moment they have lost it.

The middle of the prayer moves on that confidence. A claim comes first, then an action taken because of the claim, then the request. Fewer than eighty words carry the whole argument.

The claim in the opening line rewards slow reading. It says nobody who asked was left unaided. It stops short of saying everybody received the thing they asked for. Aid and answer are different words, and the prayer keeps them apart. If you have said this in a hospital corridor, you may have noticed that afterward.

Bernard of Clairvaux was a Cistercian abbot who died in 1153, and holy cards still set his name under this prayer. Some of his own writing about Mary echoes the language of the Memorare, which is probably part of why the credit stuck so hard.

The oldest known form of the words is three centuries later than Bernard. It appears inside a much longer Latin prayer, Ad sanctitatis tuae pedes, dulcissima Virgo Maria, found in devotional books from the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Herbert Thurston, the Jesuit who traced familiar prayers back through their printed sources, records it in the Hortulus Animae, in the Antidotarius Animae of Nicholas de Saliceto, and in the Precationum piarum Enchiridion compiled around 1570 by Simon Verepaeus.

In each of those books the Memorare is one passage inside a longer petition, with no author attached to it. When the shorter text was cut loose has never been pinned down. The likeliest window is late in the sixteenth century, which lands it near the lifetime of a very different Bernard.

Claude Bernard was born at Dijon on 23 December 1588 and died in Paris on 23 March 1641. He gave away an inheritance of four hundred thousand livres and spent the rest of his life among the poor, the sick, and prisoners, which is how he came by the name he is still known under, the poor priest. When Cardinal Richelieu pressed favors on him, he asked instead for stronger boards in the cart that carried condemned men to execution, because the constant dread of falling through it was distracting them from God.

Thurston's account has him learning the Memorare from his own father, then giving it away by the sackful. At one point he had more than two hundred thousand leaflets printed with the prayer in several languages so he could hand it to anyone he thought would use it.

The Catholic Encyclopedia entry on him, published in 1907, says he did much to popularize the prayer, and adds that it is sometimes attributed to him but is certainly of an earlier date. The slip from the prayer of Father Bernard to the prayer of St Bernard is a very short one, and it remains the likeliest explanation for a credit that has outlived every correction.

If the version you were handed at a funeral does not match the version on a holy card, neither of you is wrong. The text moved for centuries. A 1741 edition of the Coeleste Palmetum prints a longer Memorare that has absorbed lines from the Sub Tuum Praesidium, the Salve Regina, and the Ave Maria.

The form most people know now is the one Pope Pius IX attached an indulgence to on 11 December 1846. That is the text printed in the Raccolta, the official collection of indulgenced prayers, and its authority is what finally settled the Latin. The English kept drifting anyway.

Three American prayer books show how far. The 1907 Manual of the Purgatorian Society ends the prayer in thy mercy hear and answer me. The 1910 English Raccolta and the 1925 Blessed Be God both end it in thy clemency. The 1907 and 1925 books read implored thy help, and sought thy intercession, where the Raccolta reads or sought thy intercession. The text above follows those printings, with nothing modernized except spelling and capitals.

The Latin drifted too, though less. The Raccolta prints quemquam ad tua currentem praesidia. The Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, the Vatican list of indulgenced prayers in use today, prints recurrentem. Cards sold now commonly read Inspired by this confidence and to thee do I come where the older books read Inspired with and to thee I come, and some publishers have swapped thy and thee for your and you. None of it changes the prayer.

It is short and it asks for one thing, so it turns up where nothing longer is possible: outside an operating room, or in a parking lot before a conversation you have been dreading for a week.

Francis de Sales is the case people cite first. As a student in Paris in the 1580s he fell into a long despair over predestination and became convinced he was already damned. The Catholic Encyclopedia says he was suddenly freed from it as he knelt before an image of Our Lady at Saint-Etienne-des-Gres. Devotional writers name the Memorare as the prayer he said there; the encyclopedia entry does not, so take that detail as tradition and not as record. If the tradition is right, the words were already circulating in Paris before Claude Bernard was born in December 1588.

A widespread custom says the prayer nine times in a row and calls that a flying novena. The Mother Teresa Center lists the Memorare among her favorite prayers, and hers is the name usually attached to the nine-times habit. No rule sets the number. Other people put the prayer at the end of the Rosary, or against a standing list of the names they worry about.

Catholic teaching treats this as a request for prayer, addressed to someone held to be alive in Christ and able to pray for the living. The verbs in the Memorare sit inside that reading. It asks Mary to hear the petition and answer it, and it never asks her to forgive a sin or to save anyone. Catholics draw a firm line between a request of that kind and worship, which they hold belongs to God alone.

Most Protestants do not pray to Mary and would not use this prayer. The reason usually given is 1 Timothy 2:5, which names one mediator between God and men, together with the absence of any scriptural instruction to address prayer to anyone else. Protestants who hold that view still honor Mary. Luke 1:48 belongs to everyone.

The disagreement is old and real, and this page is not where it gets settled. PrayWithJesus.ai has no ecclesiastical approval and no teaching authority. The assistant here is software; it cannot tell you whether asking Mary to pray for you is right, and it has no standing to try. Ask a priest or a pastor inside your own tradition, and read the passages both sides cite.