The Prayer of St. Francis

Begin with the thing most pages get wrong. The prayer is absent from every authenticated writing of Francis. It sits in no medieval manuscript and in none of the Latin or Umbrian texts scholars accept as his. Nothing traces it back further than 1912.

The internal evidence agrees. Francis wrote outward, addressing God at length and by name. This prayer names neither God nor Jesus once, and it runs on I and me from its first line to its last. That is the sound of modern devotional writing. Thirteenth century prayer sounds different.

The prayer is still worth praying. Only the label is wrong. Knowing who wrote a prayer, and when, is part of praying it honestly.

The earliest known printing is issue twelve of La Clochette, the December 1912 bulletin of a Paris Catholic association called La Ligue de la Sainte-Messe. It sat on page 285 under the title Belle prière à faire pendant la Messe, a beautiful prayer to say during Mass. No author was named. The magazine ran monthly from 1901 to 1919 for about eight thousand subscribers, and the historian Christian Renoux, whose 2001 study settled most of this, found that its texts were generally written by the founding editor, Father Esther Bouquerel.

In 1915 the Marquis Stanislas de La Rochethulon sent the prayer to Pope Benedict XV. He led an Anglo-French peace association called Souvenir Normand, and Rome filed the prayer under its name. L'Osservatore Romano ran an Italian version on its front page on 20 January 1916, headed The prayers of Souvenir Normand for peace, with a muddled note describing a prayer to the Sacred Heart inspired by the testament of William the Conqueror. The Paris daily La Croix reprinted the same heading and the same note in French eight days later. La Rochethulon wrote in to say it was no prayer of Souvenir Normand, and said nothing about La Clochette.

Around 1918 the Franciscan Father Étienne Benoît reprinted it on the back of a mass produced holy card showing his order's founder, still with no author named. By 22 January 1927 it had reached the United States, where the Quaker magazine Friends' Intelligencer printed it under a title that credited Francis and misspelled Assisi in the same breath. During the Second World War Archbishop Francis Spellman gave away millions of copies, Senator Albert W. Hawkes read it into the Congressional Record, and the borrowed name set like concrete.

The 1912 French carries eight petitions. Most English prayer cards carry six. Where there is discord, let me place unity and where there is error, let me place truth are the two that vanish. Catholic Online prints the six line version and mentions no cut.

Three smaller drifts are worth catching. The French verb is mettre, to put or place, so the request is to set love down in the spot hatred is already occupying; the familiar sow is a translator's flourish. The final verb is ressusciter, to be raised, and the card's born again to eternal life takes the resurrection out of it. And the clause c'est en s'oubliant qu'on trouve, it is in forgetting oneself that one finds, names nothing as the thing found. The common card solves that by dropping the clause.

Here is the 1912 text as it was printed. Its copyright expired long ago, which is why this page can set it in front of you whole:

Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de votre paix. Là où il y a de la haine, que je mette l'amour. Là où il y a l'offense, que je mette le pardon. Là où il y a la discorde, que je mette l'union. Là où il y a l'erreur, que je mette la vérité. Là où il y a le doute, que je mette la foi. Là où il y a le désespoir, que je mette l'espérance. Là où il y a les ténèbres, que je mette votre lumière. Là où il y a la tristesse, que je mette la joie.

Ô Seigneur, que je ne cherche pas tant à être consolé qu'à consoler, à être compris qu'à comprendre, à être aimé qu'à aimer, car c'est en donnant qu'on reçoit, c'est en s'oubliant qu'on trouve, c'est en pardonnant qu'on est pardonné, c'est en mourant qu'on ressuscite à l'éternelle vie.

The prayer moves twice. The first movement asks to be set down where something is broken and to carry the opposite into it. The second asks for a reversal of appetite: to console before being consoled, to understand before being understood, to love before being loved.

An instrument does not choose its own music. Asking to be one is asking to be handled. That is a harder request than asking God for peace, because it walks you into the conflict instead of lifting you out of it.

The closing lines lean on the Gospels without quoting them. Giving and receiving, pardoning and being pardoned, dying and rising: those pairings come straight from what Jesus taught, restated in the devotional French of 1912.

Read at two in the morning, this prayer can land like an accusation. You came looking for comfort and were handed a list of things to give away. That reaction is fair, and saying it out loud before you pray is better than swallowing it.

One way through is to take a single petition. Pick the one that names your week. If the trouble is a rupture with a sibling, pray the discord line and stop there. The prayer holds up line by line as well as whole, and nobody is grading you on the rest.

The prayer says nothing about safety, and it should not be used to talk anyone into staying near a person who is hurting them. Bringing peace where there is hatred describes a spiritual posture, and it makes no claim on which rooms you have to stay in. When someone is unsafe, distance can be the peaceable act.

Twelve step meetings use this prayer more heavily than most churches do. Alcoholics Anonymous printed it in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions in 1953, on page ninety nine, inside the chapter on Step Eleven. Members often call it the Eleventh Step prayer, or simply the St. Francis prayer.

The AA rendering parts company with the parish card at the opening noun. Where the 1912 French says instrument, AA says channel, so a search for one word and a search for the other land on two English versions of a single French sentence. Both are translations. The AA text is still under copyright, which is why this page describes it here instead of reprinting it.

If you found this page because of your drinking, your using, or someone else's, the prayer is not the treatment. Recovery runs on people: a sponsor, a meeting, a doctor, a friend who picks up the phone. Pray it on the way to them.

Francis left genuine texts, and they cost nothing to read. He composed the Canticle of the Sun at San Damiano in late 1224 while he was ill, praising God through brother sun, sister moon, and sister death, that last verse added on his deathbed. The Praises of God he wrote out by hand on a sheet at Mount La Verna and gave to Brother Leo, and the sheet is still kept in the sacristy of the Sacro Convento at Assisi. There is also the Salutation of the Blessed Virgin, the Salutation of the Virtues, the blessing for Brother Leo, and his Testament.

Father Paschal Robinson's 1906 English translation of the complete writings is public domain and free to read online. Set the Canticle beside the Peace Prayer and the gap opens immediately. Francis writes at creation and at God, and he barely writes about himself.