Mother of Perpetual Succour

To the icon that hangs in a thousand parishes.

The icon shows the Child Jesus startled by a vision of the instruments of His Passion, gripping His Mother’s hand so hard that His sandal is falling off. Her eyes are not on Him but on us. Entrusted to the Redemptorists by Pope Pius IX in 1866, it has become one of the most reproduced images in the Catholic world.

The Prayer

O Mother of Perpetual Help,
grant that I may ever invoke thy most powerful name,
which is the safeguard of the living
and the salvation of the dying.

O purest Mary, O sweetest Mary,
let thy name henceforth be ever on my lips.
Delay not, O blessed Lady, to help me
whenever I call on thee;
for in all my needs, in all my temptations,
I shall never cease to call on thee,
ever repeating thy sacred name, Mary.

O what consolation, what sweetness,
what confidence, what emotion fills my soul
when I pronounce thy sacred name,
or even only think of thee.

I thank the Lord for having given thee,
for my good, so sweet, so powerful, so lovely a name.
But I will not be content with merely pronouncing it:
let my love for thee prompt me ever to hail thee,
Mother of Perpetual Help. Amen.

About This Devotion

The perpetual novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help — a weekly novena service, usually on Wednesdays — began in St. Louis in 1922 and spread worldwide within a decade. In the Philippines, Baclaran’s Wednesday novena draws tens of thousands every week, one of the largest regular devotional gatherings anywhere.