The Divine Mercy Chaplet: how to pray it and what the words are
The prayer
To begin: the sign of the cross.
As an opening, one Our Father, in full.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Amen.
Then one Hail Mary, in full.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
To close the opening, the Apostles’ Creed.
I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.
On the large bead, before each decade:
Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of your dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.
On the ten small beads of the decade (10x):
For the sake of his sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
Repeat the two steps above until the five decades are complete.
At the very end, three times:
Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
In short
The Divine Mercy Chaplet is prayed on an ordinary rosary, with two short invocations repeated: one on the large beads and one on the ten small ones. It was written down in Polish in 1935 by Faustina Kowalska. This page gives the opening and the invocations in full, in the order of the beads.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 7 min read
When to pray it
Traditionally at three in the afternoon, the hour the Gospels attach to the death of Jesus, and at the bedside of the dying. It takes about seven minutes.
The opening borrows three prayers from the Marian rosary — Our Father, Hail Mary and Creed — in an order and a count of its own, and it is not the only borrowed part: the Trisagion at the close is older than the whole devotion. From the end of the opening to the Trisagion at the close, everything said is one of the two invocations, alternating bead by bead. That is why it takes seven minutes where the rosary takes twenty: the formulas are short, and there is no mystery to announce between one decade and the next.
It is worth noticing who addresses whom. The first invocation is directed to the Father, and what it offers is not the merit of the person praying — it is Christ’s offering, already made. The second asks for mercy on the strength of the Passion, again not on a promise to do better. The whole prayer shifts the grounds of the request from the one asking to the one who has already paid, and that inversion is why it can be prayed by someone who feels they have nothing to present.
The second half of each invocation widens the request: “and on the whole world”. The chaplet never prays only for the person praying. That is why it became the prayer traditionally said at the bedside of the dying, including by people who never knew the patient — the formula already contains the other by construction.
The hour has a textual basis. The Gospels place the death of Jesus at the ninth hour, counted from sunrise, which corresponds to three in the afternoon. Praying then is a devotional choice, not an obligation: anyone at work at three in the afternoon prays when they can, and the prayer loses nothing by it.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Written down in 1935, in Poland
The chaplet appears in the notebooks of Helena Kowalska, the Polish religious known as Faustina, written in Polish between 1934 and 1938 and later published as the Diary. She died in 1938, aged thirty-three, and her original text is now in the public domain — which is not true of the modern translations of the Diary, which are the work of identifiable translators. That is why this page publishes the recited invocations and no passage of the Diary itself.
The devotion did not spread in a straight line. On 6 March 1959 the Holy Office issued a notification forbidding the spread of images and writings promoting the devotion in the forms Faustina proposed. The reason later given by those who worked for her cause is mundane and revealing: the only version of the Diary available in Rome was a defective Italian translation that distorted what she had written. The prohibition was withdrawn on 15 April 1978.
The structure deliberately borrows: the chaplet is prayed on the same rosary beads as always, with no new object and no new sequence to learn. Anyone who can pray a rosary can learn this in a minute — which is very likely the practical reason it spread so fast after 1978.
Little-known details
The devotion was banned for nineteen years because of a bad translation
The closing prayer is not Faustina’s: it is about fifteen hundred years old
It needs no beads of its own, and that explains a great deal
What the passages say
44Now it was nearly the sixth hour, and a darkness occurred over the entire earth, until the ninth hour.
45And the sun was obscured. And the veil of the temple was torn down the middle.
46And Jesus, crying out with a loud voice, said: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And upon saying this, he expired.
The passage that fixes the hour of the devotion. Luke marks the sixth hour and the ninth, counted from sunrise — the ninth being three in the afternoon. It is this detail, and not a scheduling preference, that explains why the chaplet is prayed then.
33But after they had approached Jesus, when they saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.
34Instead, one of the soldiers opened his side with a lance, and immediately there went out blood and water.
The two rays of the image attached to this devotion come from here: blood and water from the opened side. Christian tradition read the sacraments in them, and that reading is many centuries older than anything written down in 1935.
4Yet still, God, who is rich in mercy, for the sake of his exceedingly great charity with which he loved us,
5even when we were dead in our sins, has enlivened us together in Christ, by whose grace you have been saved.
The sentence that gives the devotion its name. Paul presents mercy as the cause of salvation rather than a consequence of the behaviour of the person saved — which is exactly the logic of the chaplet’s two invocations.
16Therefore, let us go forth with confidence toward the throne of grace, so that we may obtain mercy, and find grace, in a helpful time.
The text authorises approaching with confidence, and the verb matters: obtaining mercy is presented as something sought, not something earned. It is the biblical basis for the posture of the chaplet, which asks without claiming any merit at all.