How to Pray a Novena

Novenas

Nine days of prayer

What a novena is, how to keep one, and what to expect.

A novena is nine consecutive days of prayer for a particular intention. The number comes from the nine days the apostles and Our Lady spent in the upper room between the Ascension and Pentecost — the first novena, and the only one the Church can point to in Scripture.

How to Pray One

  1. Choose your intention. Be specific. "For my brother’s marriage" prays better than "for my family."
  2. Choose your novena. To the Holy Spirit, the Sacred Heart, Our Lady under one of her titles, or a saint whose life touches your need.
  3. Pick your nine days. Many novenas end on a feast day, so count back nine days from the feast.
  4. Pray it at the same time each day. Morning or evening, but the same time — that is what carries you past day four, when enthusiasm runs out.
  5. Finish it. If you miss a day, simply continue; do not abandon the whole thing over one lapse.

What a Novena Is Not

It is not a mechanism. Nine days of prayer do not oblige God to act, and a novena prayed perfectly does not guarantee the outcome you asked for. Prayers offered with the assumption that God must comply are closer to superstition than to faith.

What a novena does reliably is change the person praying it. Nine days of returning to the same intention clarifies what you actually want, and often reveals that what you asked for on day one is not quite what you were asking for by day nine.

The Great Novenas

  • To the Holy Spirit — Ascension to Pentecost, the original novena.
  • Divine Mercy — Good Friday to the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday.
  • St. Andrew Christmas Novena — from 30 November to Christmas.
  • Sacred Heart — before the June solemnity.
  • St. Jude — for desperate cases, prayed at any time.
  • Immaculate Conception — the nine days before 8 December.

A Note on Chain Prayers

Ignore any novena that instructs you to publish it, forward it, or promises that it "has never been known to fail." Those conditions have nothing to do with Catholic prayer. A novena asks; it does not bargain.