The Memorare: the full text and where the prayer actually comes from
The prayer
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided.
Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me. Amen.
In short
The Memorare is a short Marian prayer that asks for intercession by way of an argument: no one who turned to Mary was ever left unaided. It comes from a longer fifteenth-century Latin prayer, and the attribution to Bernard of Clairvaux does not survive scrutiny.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 6 min read
When to pray it
When the request has already been made every other way and nothing has moved. It is short enough to pray standing in a hospital corridor, and it is the prayer Marian devotion reaches for when confidence has run out.
The first thing to notice about the Memorare is that it does not begin by asking. It begins by remembering. The petition only arrives in the third block, after two that establish why the petition makes sense — and that order is the whole prayer. Anyone praying it is rebuilding their own confidence out loud before they ask for anything.
The argument is from precedent, and it is worth being clear about what it rests on: “never was it known”. That is not a promise from Scripture and not a guarantee of outcome. It is the accumulated testimony of everyone who prayed before, offered as a reason to pray again. It is a bold claim, and the prayer puts it first precisely because everything else leans on it.
Catholic devotion understands Mary’s intercession as asking, not substituting: God is the one who grants, and what is asked of her is that she ask alongside — the same thing you do when you ask a friend to pray for you, with the difference that this one is already in God’s presence. Most Protestant and evangelical churches do not hold that practice and pray directly to God. This page describes what the devotion claims and does not settle the question.
The scene Marian devotion invokes most often is Cana, and it is a curious support. Mary notices the problem and takes it to Jesus; the only instruction she gives the servants is to do whatever he tells them. It is a gesture that points away from herself — which, in a text about intercession, is exactly the point.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Fifteenth century, in Latin; spread in the seventeenth
The Memorare did not begin as a prayer of its own. It is the closing section of a longer Latin text of the fifteenth century, Ad sanctitatis tuae pedes, dulcissima Virgo Maria, by an author nobody has identified. At some point that last section broke away and began circulating alone, memorised and recited without the rest — and it is the loose fragment the world now knows.
The attribution to St Bernard of Clairvaux, of the twelfth century, is old and does not hold: the prayer appears in none of his authenticated works. There is a likely culprit for the confusion, and he was also called Bernard. Claude Bernard (1588-1641) was a French priest who worked with prisoners and the poor of Paris, known as “the poor priest”, and who had the prayer printed and distributed in more than two hundred thousand leaflets, in several languages. He is the one who made it famous. Centuries later, the populariser’s surname was read as the author’s.
The English form recited today keeps a deliberately archaic register — thee, thou, unaided, despise not. Nobody speaks that way, and that is exactly why the prayer is recognisable on the first syllable: the stiffness of the formula is what has kept it identical in the mouths of people reciting it for generations.
Little-known details
There are two Bernards, and the famous one is the wrong one
The prayer’s name is simply its first word
Some people pray nine in a row instead of nine days
What the passages say
26Then, in the sixth month, the Angel Gabriel was sent by God, to a city of Galilee named Nazareth,
27to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the name of the virgin was Mary.
28And upon entering, the Angel said to her: “Hail, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.”
The angel’s greeting, the root of all devotional language addressed to Mary. Note that the initiative is God’s, and that the passage describes nothing she did to earn the visit — which is the basis of the Catholic reading that she intercedes out of grace received rather than merit accumulated.
1And on the third day, a wedding was held in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.
2Now Jesus was also invited to the wedding, with his disciples.
3And when the wine was failing, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”
4And Jesus said to her: “What is that to me and to you, woman? My hour has not yet arrived.”
5His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
The only scene in the Gospels where Mary asks Jesus for anything, and his answer begins by refusing. The detail almost everyone misses is her final instruction to the servants: do whatever he says. She points at him, not at herself.
26Therefore, when Jesus had seen his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son.”
27Next, he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother.” And from that hour, the disciple accepted her as his own.
The text behind the habit of calling her Mother outside any biological relation. The Catholic reading takes the words from the cross as addressed to all disciples through the one standing there; other traditions read a son making provision for a widowed mother. Both readings fit the verse.
5For there is one God, and one mediator of God and of men, the man Christ Jesus,
The strongest objection to praying to the saints, and it belongs on this page. Paul states one mediator between God and men. The Catholic answer is that asking someone to pray for you does not create a second mediator — otherwise asking a living friend to pray would be forbidden too. A reader who takes the verse to exclude any intermediary reaches a different conclusion, and this page does not choose between them.