Prayer of Saint Benedict: the medal’s text and what the letters mean
The prayer
The Cross of our holy father Benedict. May we be strengthened by his presence in the hour of our death.
May the holy Cross be my light; let the dragon never be my guide.
Begone, Satan! Never tempt me with your vanities. What you offer me is evil: drink the poison yourself.
Peace.
In short
The prayer of Saint Benedict is the text stamped in initials on his medal: a request that the cross be light, and a refusal addressed to the devil in verse. Benedict did not write it — he died in the sixth century, and the lines appear in a manuscript of 1415.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
On leaving the house, on entering somewhere that frightens you, and whenever temptation arrives with a good argument. It is a prayer of refusal, which is why it is short and blunt.
The prayer is entirely refusal, and the form matters. It does not ask for evil to be destroyed or for the enemy to be punished: it orders him off and hands the offer back. That is the structure of Jesus’ answer in the desert — the one being tempted does not argue, does not negotiate and does not examine the proposal. He names it and refuses it.
The most interesting line is the easiest to skim past: “never tempt me with your vanities”. The danger described is not obvious wickedness but advice — something that presents itself as reasonable and fits into a conversation. The prayer assumes temptation arrives with an argument, not with horns.
The image of the cross as light and the dragon as guide is a choice between two guides, not between two ideas. A guide is the one who walks ahead and shows the way. So the prayer asks something very concrete: who am I letting lead me when I do not know where to go.
One clarification about the medal, since the confusion is common. It is a sacramental — an object of devotion — and not a charm that works on its own. Catholic tradition is explicit here: whatever effect is attributed belongs to the prayer of the person wearing it, not to the metal. Used as a talisman, the medal stops being what the tradition itself says it is.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Verses attested in 1415; the medal in its present form since 1880
The Saint Benedict medal carries, around the cross, a run of initials that for centuries nobody could read. People wore the object without knowing what was written on it — which sounds strange now and was ordinary then, since the medal passed from hand to hand by use rather than by instruction.
The explanation surfaced by an improbable route. At a witchcraft trial at Natternberg, near the abbey of Metten in Bavaria, in 1647, the accused women are said to have declared that they had no power over the abbey because it was protected by the cross. The investigation found the same crosses ringed with letters painted on the monastery walls, and in the library a manuscript of 1415 showing Benedict with a staff and a scroll — with the phrases written out in full. The initials were theirs.
The design in use today is much later: it is the so-called jubilee medal, struck in 1880 under the supervision of the monks of Montecassino for the fourteen-hundredth anniversary of Benedict’s birth. It fixed the arrangement of the letters and the image for good, and it is the one sold in every religious-goods shop.
Little-known details
The letters were decoded because of a witchcraft trial
Benedict did not write this prayer — what is his is the Rule
“Vade retro” is something Jesus says to Peter, not to the devil
There are four letters on the medal nobody notices
What the passages say
8Again, the devil took him up, onto a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory,
9and said to him, “All these things I will give to you, if you will fall down and adore me.”
10Then Jesus said to him: “Go away, Satan. For it has been written: ‘You shall adore the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’ ”
The scene the prayer imitates. Note the procedure: Jesus does not engage with the offer, does not assess it and does not explain the refusal. He orders it away and cites Scripture. The medal prayer does exactly that, in four lines.
23And turning away, Jesus said to Peter: “Get behind me, Satan; you are an obstacle to me. For you are not behaving according to what is of God, but according to what is of men.”
The source of the phrase “vade retro”, and the addressee is a surprise: it is Peter, who has just tried to talk Jesus out of suffering. The detail is theologically dense — the temptation arrived there through the closest disciple, and with the best of intentions.
7Therefore, be subject to God. But resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
The instruction in two parts, in the order the prayer uses them: submit to God first, resist the devil second. The promise that he will flee follows from both together, not from the second on its own.
11Be clothed in the armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the treachery of the devil.
12For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the directors of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in high places.
13Because of this, take up the armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand the evil day and remain perfect in all things.
The text that grounds the combat language the prayer uses. Worth noting that the armour described is defensive throughout, with a single exception — which frames the fight as resistance rather than assault.