The Divine Mercy Chaplet, as Prayed in a Family: the full text
The prayer
To begin: 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.
Then 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.
To close the opening, three Hail Marys, in full (3x).
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.
On the large bead before each decade — the wording they prayed, in their Portuguese:
Eterno Pai, eu Vos ofereço o Corpo, Sangue, Alma e Divindade de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo, em expiação dos nossos pecados e dos pecados do mundo inteiro.
In English: Eternal Father, I offer you the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and for the sins of the whole world.
On the ten small beads of the decade (10x) — again their Portuguese first:
Pela Sua dolorosa Paixão, tende misericórdia de nós e do mundo inteiro.
In English: 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 — their Portuguese first:
Deus Santo, Deus Forte, Deus Imortal, tende piedade de nós e do mundo inteiro.
In English: Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
In short
The two invocations are those of the chaplet recorded in 1935 by Faustina Kowalska, and were not written by the women this page credits. From Valéria Cristina Schmitt and Maria Aparecida Brandão Schmitt comes the way they prayed it at home: the Brazilian rosary opening, and their own wording of the two invocations of the decades.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 10 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. From the Creed to the last Holy God, it takes about seven minutes.
On the decades, this page and the page of the full form share the same structure: one invocation on the large bead, another on the ten small ones, five times over. What changes between them is the opening — a different order, and three Hail Marys in place of one — and the exact words of the two invocations. It is little, and the little is exactly what tends to go unrecorded anywhere: the prayer book publishes the form, and the form a family prays dies with the family.
It is worth noticing what each invocation does, because the two do not do the same thing. The first offers, and what it offers belongs to nobody who is praying — it is the offering of Christ, made before anyone arrived. The second asks, resting on the Passion. Neither rests the request on merit or on a promise to do better, and that is what makes the chaplet prayable on the worst day of a life, without having to become presentable first.
Repetition is the obvious objection, and it is worth facing before repeating two sentences until they add up to fifty-five invocations. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus criticises those who think they will be heard for speaking a great deal — and the line right after it, saying the Father already knows what is needed, is what separates repeating from accumulating. Repeating is not piling up arguments; it is staying on the same request. Some of the shortest requests in the Gospels are precisely the ones granted: the man at the back of the temple, the blind man by the roadside.
Both invocations end by pointing outwards — one closes with “and for the sins of the whole world”, the other with “and on the whole world”. Neither stops at the person praying, and that is rarer than it sounds: most prayers people learn by heart ask for the one saying them first. Here there is no room for it. The whole world is inside the formula, and anyone wanting to ask for themselves alone would have to change the words.
This page publishes a family form, not the form the devotion usually takes. Anyone looking for the chaplet as it is normally published — with the opening in the other order and the longer wording of the invocations — will find all of it on its own page, linked below. The two live side by side on purpose: one is the devotion as it circulates, the other is how two people in one family prayed it together.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared A family form, with no recorded date
The two invocations on this page do not belong to the women who prayed them: they come from the chaplet recorded in 1935 by Helena Kowalska, the Polish nun known as Faustina, whose original text is now in the public domain. What reached this page through Valéria Cristina Schmitt and Maria Aparecida Brandão Schmitt is the way the two of them prayed the chaplet at home, from start to finish, and the wording in which they said the invocations. The date they began praying it this way is not recorded, and this page does not invent one.
The opening is what separates this page from the form the devotion usually takes, and the difference is stated here rather than hidden. As it is normally published, the chaplet opens, after the sign of the cross, with an Our Father, one Hail Mary and the Creed, in that order — which is how the page of the full form on this site carries it. What reached us here opens the way a rosary is begun in Brazil: the Creed first, then one Our Father, then three Hail Marys. Neither one corrects the other, and this one was not normalised against that one: it is the form that reached us. That anyone who already prays the rosary would open the chaplet the same way is the likeliest thing in the world, and it is what is heard across much of Brazil.
The wording of the invocations is theirs too, and it diverges from the one this site publishes on the page of the full form. There the invocation of the large bead reads “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”. Theirs diverges in four places, and not all of them shorten: in their Portuguese the pronoun is capitalised (“eu Vos ofereço” for “eu vos ofereço”), “of your dearly beloved Son” drops out, the enumeration is stripped of its first “and” (leaving “the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity”), and the ending grows rather than shrinks — “and for the sins of the whole world” in place of “and those of the whole world”. The second invocation diverges in one detail only, of the same kind as the first: theirs reads “Pela Sua dolorosa Paixão”, with a capital “Sua”, where the full form has “Pela sua”. Both capitals are the kind of mark that gives away who wrote something down, and that is why they were kept. The “Deus Santo, Deus Forte, Deus Imortal” at the end, by contrast, is word for word what the full form carries; only the three capitals arrived different. The rule of this site is to reuse the wording it already publishes, so that two versions of the same prayer never coexist here. That rule yields on this page, and it yields on purpose: in a prayer received from someone, what gets published is the wording of the people who pray it. The Creed, the Our Father and the Hail Marys of the opening, by contrast, appear word for word as their own pages carry them.
Little-known details
The opening is not the chaplet’s: it comes from the rosary as prayed in Brazil
The form prayed in a house is almost never the form in the prayer book
What the passages say
13And the tax collector, standing at a distance, was not willing to even lift up his eyes to heaven. But he struck his chest, saying: ‘O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’
14I say to you, this one descended to his house justified, but not the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled; and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
One of the shortest prayers Luke records as answered — and the only one where he says outright that the person went home justified. A man at the back of the temple who does not even raise his eyes and asks for mercy in a single sentence. Notice which of the two Luke sends home justified: it is not the one who prayed more.
47And when he had heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and to say, “Jesus, Son of David, take pity on me.”
48And many admonished him to be quiet. But he cried out all the more, “Son of David, take pity on me.”
The blind man by the roadside asks for mercy, the crowd tells him to be quiet, and he says it again, louder. It is the scene the repetition of this chaplet imitates without citing: the same sentence, insisted upon, with no new argument between one and the next.
7And when praying, do not choose many words, as the pagans do. For they think that by their excess of words they might be heeded.
8Therefore, do not choose to imitate them. For your Father knows what your needs may be, even before you ask him.
The objection every repeated prayer has to face, which is why it sits here rather than out of sight. Notice that the criticism targets the piling up of words by those who expect to be heard for saying a lot, and that the following line says the Father already knows what is needed — an argument for praying briefly, not at length.
5calling to mind the same faith, which is in you unfeigned, which also first dwelt in your grandmother, Lois, and in your mother, Eunice, and also, I am certain, in you.
Paul describes Timothy’s faith by naming his grandmother and his mother before him, and it is the passage that best explains why a family’s way of praying is worth recording: in the New Testament, faith reaches people through other people with names, not through a manual.