Prayer to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots: text and where it came from
The prayer
Mary, who undoes knots, ask God for me.
I am carrying one knot I pulled tight myself and another that was pulled tight around me. I can no longer tell them apart, and every time I pull, it closes further.
Loosen today whatever can be loosened. Whatever cannot, give me the patience to hold it without pulling.
Show me the right end: the word still to be said, the call I keep putting off, the apology I am sure I do not owe.
Let me not cut in a hurry what comes undone slowly. Amen.
In short
This is a prayer to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots written for this site and signed by the person who wrote it. The devotion comes from a painting made around 1700 in Augsburg, Germany, and reached South America through the future Pope Francis.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
When something has been stuck for far too long — a relationship, a case, a conversation. It is a prayer for jammed situations, not for emergencies.
The prayer above makes a distinction the devotion usually skips: there is the knot you pulled tight yourself and the knot somebody pulled tight around you. Treating the two the same way is what jams most situations. One calls for repair and the other for acceptance, and confusing them produces that futile effort of trying to fix alone what depends on somebody else.
The central request is not that the knot disappear but that the right end appear. The image in the painting helps: whoever unties a ribbon does not pull at random, but at the point that gives. The prayer asks for discernment about where to pull — and it names concrete things, because real knots tend to come undone through a conversation rather than through a feeling.
The text is ours and it is signed. The novenas to Our Lady Undoer of Knots circulating in English are modern compositions of uncertain authorship, and reproducing one here would mean publishing somebody’s text. The history of the devotion, above, is documented and a good deal more interesting than any anonymous text.
Catholic devotion asks Mary to intercede: God is the one who unties, and what is asked of her is that she ask alongside. Most Protestant and evangelical churches do not hold that practice and pray directly to God. This page sets out what the devotion claims and does not decide between the two readings.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared A painting made around 1700 in Augsburg; this text was written in 2026
The devotion begins with a baroque painting: the Virgin untying a long ribbon full of knots, painted by Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner around 1700 and still kept in the church of St Peter am Perlach in Augsburg, Bavaria. It was commissioned by Hieronymus Ambrosius Langenmantel (1641-1718), a canon of the city, in thanks for a favour received by his grandparents, whose marriage had been on the point of ending.
The idea behind the image is far older than the painting. It comes from Irenaeus of Lyon, in the second century, who wrote that the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by the obedience of Mary. The painting is the visual translation, fifteen hundred years later, of a sentence of theology — and it is rare for a popular devotion to have an origin that precise and that quotable.
The devotion’s arrival in South America has a known agent. In the 1980s, while studying in Germany, the Argentine Jesuit Jorge Bergoglio saw the painting in Augsburg and took images of it home to Argentina, where the devotion grew and later spread to Brazil. It reached the English-speaking world largely after his election as pope in 2013. The novena texts circulating in English are modern compositions with no declared authorship, which is why this page carries a prayer of our own.
Little-known details
The devotion starts with a marriage nearly ended, in 1615
The image of the knot is second-century, not eighteenth
The painting only became famous once it left Germany
What the passages say
4Then the serpent said to the woman: “By no means will you die a death.
5For God knows that, on whatever day you will eat from it, your eyes will be opened; and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
6And so the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and beautiful to the eyes, and delightful to consider. And she took from its fruit, and she ate. And she gave to her husband, who ate.
The original knot, on the reading by Irenaeus that gives rise to this devotion. Note the mechanism described: disobedience begins with a reinterpretation of what was said, not with an act of contempt. That is why the comparison with Mary works — the contrast is between two ways of answering a word received.
38Then Mary said: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word.” And the Angel departed from her.
The answer Irenaeus places on the other side of the comparison. The line is short and it is not passive: she consents after having asked how such a thing could be. The text keeps both the question and the consent, in that order.
19For, just as through the disobedience of one man, many were established as sinners, so also through the obedience of one man, many shall be established as just.
The structure of thought Irenaeus inherited from Paul: one man’s disobedience and another’s obedience, set in parallel. In Paul the pair is Adam and Christ; later tradition added the female pair, Eve and Mary, on the same frame.
45And blessed are you who believed, for the things that were spoken to you by the Lord shall be accomplished.”
The beatitude Elizabeth pronounces, and the reason for it: having believed. In a subject about knots coming undone, it is useful to see that the praise falls on trust in something that had not happened yet.