The Prayer of Saint Francis: the text, and why it is not by Saint Francis
The prayer
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
In short
The prayer “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace” is not by Francis of Assisi. It appeared anonymously, in French, in a small Catholic bulletin in 1912, seven centuries after his death. The attribution grew out of a devotional card printed around 1918, and it was never undone.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 6 min read
When to pray it
Before a hard conversation, a tense meeting, or seeing again someone you have fallen out with. It is a prayer of preparation: it does not ask for the situation to change, but for the one praying to arrive at it differently.
The construction is in antitheses, and each one names what is wrong first. Hatred, injury, doubt, despair, darkness, sadness: the prayer does not pretend these do not exist, and beginning with them is why it never sounds naive. The request is never that evil disappear — it is that the one praying walk into it carrying something else.
The second stanza is the hardest to pray sincerely. To console rather than be consoled, to understand rather than be understood, to love rather than be loved: it renounces three things any person legitimately wants. Praying it on a day when you feel misunderstood is asking for something that costs, and the prayer does not disguise the cost.
The three closing lines are paradoxes, and all three are in the New Testament before they are here. “It is in giving that we receive” is nearly the saying Paul credits to Jesus in Acts 20:35; “it is in dying that we are born” is the grain of wheat in John 12; and the link between pardoning and being pardoned is the one condition the Lord’s Prayer sets.
Because it names neither Jesus nor Mary nor any saint, this is the most ecumenical prayer in the cluster: it is said in Catholic and Protestant churches, read at graduations and civic ceremonies, and quoted by people with no religion. That says something about the text — and it also explains why the wrong name stuck to it so easily.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared 1912, anonymous, in French
The oldest known printing is from December 1912, in La Clochette, the small bulletin of a French Catholic association founded by Father Esther Bouquerel, under the title “A beautiful prayer to say during Mass”. It carried no signature. The reconstruction of this history is the work of the French historian Christian Renoux, whose 2001 study is the reference on the question.
The link with Francis of Assisi is accidental and leaves a paper trail. In 1915 a French marquis sent the text to Benedict XV, and L’Osservatore Romano printed it in January 1916. Around 1918 a Franciscan priest printed it on the back of a devotional card that carried an image of Saint Francis on the front. From the card to the attribution was a single step, and the step was never retraced: during the Second World War the prayer circulated widely in the United States with the saint’s name already attached.
Nothing in Francis’s authentic writings resembles this text — not the vocabulary, not the construction in antitheses, not the theme. His writings are in Latin and in the Umbrian vernacular, and the oldest text of this prayer is French. Saying so takes nothing from the prayer: it is good on its own account, and this page would rather publish an anonymous text from 1912 under the right name than a text from 1912 under a thirteenth-century one.
Little-known details
A devotional card created the attribution, and nobody undid it
The English version dropped two pairs from the French original
What most English speakers sing is a different text, from 1967
The prayer asks for nothing for the one praying
What the passages say
9Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
The beatitude that matches the first line. Notice that the text is not about peaceful people in the sense of calm ones: it is about those who make peace, which is an activity — exactly what the prayer asks for with the word “instrument”.
27But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you.
28Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who slander you.
The passage that supplies the pattern for every antithesis in the prayer: answering hatred with good, cursing with blessing. The instruction is addressed to those listening and describes no feeling — it describes what to do.
35I have revealed all things to you, because by laboring in this way, it is necessary to support the weak and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ”
“It is in giving that we receive” has its near-literal source here: Paul quotes a saying of Jesus that appears in no Gospel. It is the only sentence of its kind in the New Testament, which makes the closing of the prayer a second-hand quotation of something that survived only by being quoted.
24Amen, amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
25it remains alone. But if it dies, it yields much fruit. Whoever loves his life, will lose it. And whoever hates his life in this world, preserves it unto eternal life.
The grain of wheat, which underwrites the last line. The text pays no compliment to death: it uses a farming comparison to say that whatever is kept whole stays alone, and the prayer applies that logic to consolation, to understanding and to love.