How to Pray a Novena: The Catholic Guide to Nine Days of Prayer

1. What Is a Novena?

A novena is a set of prayers said on nine consecutive days for a particular intention. The word comes from the Latin novem, nine. Most novenas are addressed to God through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary or a saint, and most combine a fixed prayer, a personal petition in your own words, and the basic prayers every Catholic knows.

A novena belongs to what the Church calls popular piety: devotions that grew up among the faithful alongside the liturgy, approved by the Church and commended to anyone who finds them helpful. No Catholic is obliged to pray a novena. Millions do because a novena gives shape to the hardest kind of prayer, the prayer you keep making when nothing has changed yet.

There are four common kinds:

• Novenas of petition, the most common: nine days asking for a specific grace, such as healing, work, a spouse or the conversion of a loved one.
• Novenas of preparation, prayed in the nine days before a feast, such as the novena to the Holy Spirit before Pentecost or the Christmas novena from 16 to 24 December.
• Novenas of thanksgiving, prayed after a prayer has been answered.
• Novenas for the dead, nine days of prayer for someone who has died. When a pope dies the Church still keeps the novendiales, nine days of Masses for his soul.

Here is the hard truth to start with. A novena does not twist God's arm. Jesus told us to pray and never lose heart (Luke 18:1), and a novena is simply that command given a calendar. The point of the nine days is what they do to you: they make you show up, name the need, hand it over and hand it over again until your heart starts to trust.

2. Where Do Novenas Come From?

Novenas come from the first nine days of the Church. After Jesus ascended into heaven, the apostles went back to the upper room in Jerusalem, and "all these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers" (Acts 1:14). Counting from the Ascension to Pentecost, that waiting lasted nine days. The Holy Spirit came on the tenth. Every novena since has been a small imitation of that room: believers praying together, with Mary, waiting on God.

The prayer of the first novena is still the Church's prayer to the Holy Spirit:

Nine-day observances also have older roots. The Romans kept nine days of mourning after a death, and Christians took the custom and filled it with prayer for the dead. Over the centuries, nine days of preparation before great feasts spread through Spain, France and Italy, and from there to Latin America and the Philippines. The Philippine Simbang Gabi, nine dawn Masses from 16 to 24 December, and the Mexican Las Posadas, nine nights re-enacting Mary and Joseph's search for shelter, are both novenas in everything but name.

In 1897, in his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Divinum Illud Munus, Pope Leo XIII decreed that a novena to the Holy Spirit be held every year before Pentecost in parish churches. The Pentecost novena is the one novena with the clearest root in Scripture, and if you have never prayed one, start there next spring.

3. How to Pray a Novena, Step by Step

To pray a novena, choose one clear intention, choose a novena prayer, and pray it at the same time every day for nine days in a row. That is the whole method. These eight steps make it stick.

1. Name one intention. Write it down in a single sentence. "That my son comes home." "That I find work before the lease ends." "That my marriage survives this year." Vague prayers produce vague attention.
2. Choose the right novena. Use the directory below. A saint with a connection to your need (St. Joseph for work, St. Rita for a broken marriage, St. Jude for a hopeless case) gives your prayer a companion who has been there.
3. Choose your nine days. Start today, or count back nine days from a feast so that your novena ends on the eve of the saint's day. The calendar below gives the dates.
4. Fix a time and a place. Same chair, same hour. Attach it to something you already do: the first coffee, the drive home, the last light off.
5. Begin with the Sign of the Cross and an act of contrition. Come to God clean. A short "O my God, I am sorry for my sins" is enough.
6. Pray the novena prayer slowly, then name your intention in your own words. Tell God exactly what you want and exactly what you fear. He already knows. You need to say it.
7. Close with an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be. Many novenas add these three, or ask for them three times. They anchor your private request in the prayer of the whole Church.
8. Add the sacraments if you can. Go to confession during the nine days and receive Communion at Mass, especially on the last day. A novena prayed from a state of grace is a novena prayed with your whole life.

Pray it aloud if you can. Pray it with your spouse, your children or a friend if you can. Jesus promised to be present where two or three gather in His name (Matthew 18:20), and the first novena was prayed in company.

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4. What If I Miss a Day? The Rules That Matter

If you miss a day of a novena, pray the missed day as soon as you remember and carry on. God is a Father who reads the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). Most priests give that answer, and it is the sensible one. If you prefer to start again from day one as a small act of discipline, that is fine too. Neither choice changes how God hears you.

The rules that actually matter are few:

• Pray with faith. Faith means trusting God with the outcome. You do not have to feel certain you will get what you asked for.
• Pray with a clean conscience where you can. If you are carrying serious sin, the best thing you can do on day one is go to confession.
• Pray for something good. You cannot pray a novena for someone else's harm, for revenge, or for success in something sinful. Ask yourself whether you could pray the intention in front of Jesus on the Cross.
• Leave the answer with God. Every Christian petition carries the words of Gethsemane underneath it: "not my will, but yours, be done" (Luke 22:42).

Some common questions, answered quickly. You can pray more than one novena at once, though one prayed well beats three prayed in a rush. You can pray a novena for someone else without telling them. You can pray the same novena again straight after the first if your need continues; some people pray the same novena for years. You do not need a priest's permission or a printed booklet. A novena on your phone counts the same as one on a holy card.

5. Chain Novenas, "Never Fails" and Published Thanks

Chain novenas, guaranteed results and compulsory published thanks are superstition, and a Catholic should refuse all three. You have seen them: the card left in a pew or the message forwarded on WhatsApp that says "Say this prayer nine times a day for nine days and your request will be granted, no matter how impossible. Never known to fail. Publication must be promised." Some add a threat: break the chain and something bad will happen.

The Catechism names this exactly. Superstition includes attributing "an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary," and "to attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition" (CCC 2111). A prayer that promises a result because you repeated it the right number of times is treating God like a vending machine and the saints like coins. That is magic dressed in holy words.

Let us be honest about each piece:

• "Never fails." No prayer on earth guarantees a particular outcome. God answers every prayer, and sometimes His answer is no, or not yet, or something better than you asked. Jesus Himself asked for the cup to pass, and it did not.
• Chains and threats. Any prayer that tells you to copy it or forward it to a number of people, or warns of misfortune if you stop, is a chain letter. God does not punish people for failing to forward a message. Delete it with a clear conscience.
• "Publication must be promised." Thanking a saint publicly is an old and good custom; those small notices in newspaper classifieds reading "Thank you, St. Jude, for prayers answered" are acts of gratitude, and gratitude is holy. The superstition creeps in when publishing becomes a condition of the answer, a fee you pay to make the prayer work. Thank God freely, out of gratitude, in public if you like, and with no fear at all.
• Fabricated origins. Some popular prayer cards carry a preface claiming the prayer was found in a tomb or dates from the first century, and that whoever carries it will never die suddenly or drown. Those stories have no evidence behind them. The prayer underneath is often perfectly good; pray it and ignore the promises.

None of this means a novena is weak. A novena prayed with trust is powerful in the way all prayer is powerful: it brings your need before a Father who loves you, alongside saints who are alive in Christ and praying for you (Hebrews 12:1, Revelation 5:8). That is more than enough. You do not need a guarantee from a photocopied card when you have the promise of Jesus: "Ask, and it will be given you" (Matthew 7:7).

6. The Novena for Impossible Requests: St. Rita and St. Jude

The Church has two great patrons for impossible requests: St. Rita of Cascia, called the Saint of the Impossible, and St. Jude Thaddeus, the apostle invoked as patron of hopeless cases and things almost despaired of. Either is the right saint for a novena for impossible requests. Many Catholics pray to both.

St. Rita of Cascia (about 1381 to 1457, feast 22 May) lived the impossible from the inside. She was married young to a violent man, prayed him toward conversion, lost him to a murder in a family feud, forgave his killers publicly, lost both her sons, and was then refused entry to the Augustinian monastery at Cascia until, as tradition tells it, she was let in by a door nobody could explain. She bore a wound on her forehead for fifteen years and asked on her deathbed for a rose in January. She was canonised by Pope Leo XIII in 1900. Pray to St. Rita when the impossible thing is personal and domestic: a marriage, a family feud, a child, a wound that will not heal, a situation in which you need to forgive.

St. Jude Thaddeus (feast 28 October, shared with St. Simon) was one of the twelve apostles. The patronage of hopeless cases grew up long after his lifetime and spread across the world in the twentieth century, above all through the National Shrine of St. Jude founded by the Claretian Missionaries in Chicago in 1929. Pray to St. Jude when the impossible thing is outside your control entirely: a diagnosis, a court case, a debt, a job market, a situation that every expert has written off. Our page on the St. Jude prayer and novena gives his traditional prayer and nine full days.

God alone does the impossible (Luke 1:37). A saint is a friend in heaven who prays with you and for you, the way you would ask your mother or your pastor to pray (James 5:16). What Rita and Jude add is witness: Rita proves that a life that went wrong in every possible way can end in holiness and peace, and Jude proves that a forgotten man can become the friend of millions. Both say to you: it is not over.

Below is the full St. Rita novena. Pray it for nine days for the thing everyone else has given up on.

7. The St. Rita Novena in Full: Nine Days for Impossible Requests

The St. Rita novena below gives you a different prayer for each of the nine days, each drawn from a moment of her life, followed by the same closing prayer every day. The daily prayers and the closing prayer were written for this page; they are original prayers, faithful to the traditional account of her life. Many parishes pray a St. Rita novena from 13 to 21 May, ending on the eve of her feast, but you can begin on any day.

Each day: make the Sign of the Cross, pray the day's prayer, name your request in your own words, pray the closing prayer, then one Our Father, one Hail Mary and one Glory Be.

When the nine days end, thank God whatever has happened. If the answer has come, pray a novena of thanksgiving. If it has not, read the section on unanswered novenas below, then begin again if your heart tells you to. Rita knocked at the same door more than once.

8. Novena Directory: Find the Right Novena for Your Need

The right novena is the one whose saint and prayers fit your need, and these are the novenas Catholics pray most, matched to the reasons they pray them. Each linked page gives nine full days of prayer.

• A hopeless case or a lost cause: the St. Jude prayer and nine-day novena, with the traditional prayer distributed by the National Shrine of St. Jude and its history.
• An impossible personal situation: the St. Rita novena on this page.
• Money, debt and bills: the novena for financial help to St. Joseph and St. Cajetan, with a nine-day structure and practical first steps, and no prosperity-gospel promises.
• Unemployment or a new job: the novena for a job to St. Joseph the Worker, which pairs each day's prayer with a concrete job-search task.
• A future spouse or a struggling marriage: the novena for marriage, with a St. Raphael novena for a future spouse and a novena to St. Rita and the Holy Family for a marriage in crisis.
• The Holy Spirit and a new start: the Pentecost novena, using the Come, Holy Spirit prayer above each day from the Friday after Ascension Thursday until the eve of Pentecost.
• Mercy for yourself and the world: the Divine Mercy novena, which St. Faustina recorded in her Diary as asked of her by Jesus, from Good Friday to the Saturday before Divine Mercy Sunday. Our guide to the Divine Mercy Chaplet and novena gives the nine days; read about St. Faustina too.
• Lost things and lost people: a novena to St. Anthony of Padua, traditionally from 4 to 12 June. Meet St. Anthony.
• A total surrender of a situation you cannot fix: the Surrender Novena associated with the Neapolitan priest Fr. Dolindo Ruotolo, whose repeated line is "O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything."

Not sure which saint fits? Our free patron saint finder matches you with a patron in a minute, and the prayer generator will write a personal prayer for your exact situation that you can add to any novena.

9. Novena Calendar: When to Start Each Novena

To end a novena on the eve of a feast, start it nine days before the feast day. These are the start dates for the most popular feast-day novenas.

• St. Joseph (19 March): 10 to 18 March.
• St. Joseph the Worker (1 May): 22 to 30 April.
• St. Rita (22 May): 13 to 21 May.
• St. Anthony of Padua (13 June): 4 to 12 June.
• St. Cajetan (7 August): 29 July to 6 August.
• The Assumption (15 August): 6 to 14 August.
• Sts. Michael, Gabriel and Raphael (29 September): 20 to 28 September.
• St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1 October): 22 to 30 September.
• St. Jude (28 October): 19 to 27 October.
• The Immaculate Conception (8 December): 29 November to 7 December.
• Our Lady of Guadalupe (12 December): 3 to 11 December.
• Christmas (25 December): 16 to 24 December.
• Pentecost and Divine Mercy Sunday move with Easter: the Pentecost novena runs from the day after Ascension Thursday to the eve of Pentecost, and the Divine Mercy novena from Good Friday to the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday.

You never have to wait for a feast. Need does not keep a calendar, and neither does grace. The best day to start a novena is the day you need one. For the shape of the whole Church year, see our guide to the liturgical calendar.

10. What If My Novena Is Not Answered?

Every novena is answered, because God hears every prayer, and the answer is sometimes no, sometimes wait, and sometimes a gift you did not ask for and will only recognise later. That is cold comfort on the tenth day, when the test result is still bad or the house is still empty. So let us say the rest of it plainly.

An unanswered novena does not mean your faith was too small. Jesus prayed in Gethsemane with perfect faith, and the cup did not pass. St. Paul begged three times for the thorn in his flesh to be removed, and God answered, "My grace is sufficient for you" (2 Corinthians 12:9). St. Rita prayed for her husband and he was murdered anyway. If a lack of the miracle proved a lack of faith, the saints would be the greatest failures in history.

Nor does it mean you did the novena wrong, missed a word, or forgot to publish your thanks. God is not grading the paperwork. Here is what to do on day ten:

1. Tell God how you feel. The Psalms are full of complaint (read Psalm 13 or Psalm 88). Honest anger at God is still prayer.
2. Ask what grace you did receive. Many people find, looking back, that the novena gave them strength to face the outcome, even when the outcome did not change.
3. Keep doing the practical things. Prayer and action go together. Keep the appointments, take the treatment, make the calls.
4. Talk to someone. A priest, a friend, a counsellor. Do not carry the disappointment alone.
5. Pray again if you are moved to. Jesus praised the widow who kept coming back to the judge (Luke 18:1-8).

Some people come to a novena at the end of their rope. If that is you, please read this before you read anything else.

Prayer and good care go together. A novena never replaces a doctor, a therapist or medicine, and God works through all three. For the Church's wider teaching on pain that does not lift, see our guide to suffering, and if hopelessness has settled in, our guide to despair.

11. Do Protestants and the Orthodox Pray Novenas?

Novenas are a Catholic devotion. Most Protestants do not pray them, and the Orthodox have their own forms of persistent intercession in place of the novena.

Protestants, especially evangelicals and Baptists, usually object on two grounds: that praying to saints takes something from Christ, the one mediator (1 Timothy 2:5), and that set prayers repeated over days can become the "empty phrases" Jesus warned against (Matthew 6:7). Both objections deserve a serious answer. The Catholic answer is that asking a saint to pray for you is the same act as asking a fellow Christian on earth to pray for you, which Scripture commands (James 5:16); the saints are alive in God (Luke 20:38) and Revelation shows the prayers of the saints rising before God's throne (Revelation 5:8). And Jesus's warning was against babbling to manipulate God, which is exactly the superstition the Church also condemns. Persistent prayer itself He praised (Luke 11:5-13). Many Protestants keep their own nine-day or forty-day seasons of prayer and fasting, which share the same instinct.

The Orthodox pray constantly to the Mother of God and the saints, but through forms such as the Akathist hymns and the Paraklesis service, a service of supplication to the Theotokos often prayed in times of trouble. The idea is the same: bring your need to God, with the saints, again and again. For the wider differences, see our guides to Catholic and Protestant belief and the Eastern Orthodox Church.

12. After the Ninth Day: Keep Praying

The best way to end a novena is to keep praying after it is over. Nine days is a training ground. The aim is a life in which prayer has no end date.

1. Give thanks today, whatever the outcome. Write down one grace from the nine days.
2. Keep one prayer from the novena in your daily routine. The Memorare, the Come Holy Spirit, or the closing prayer to St. Rita all fit into a minute.
3. Go to Mass this Sunday and, if you can, confession this month. Novenas grow out of the sacraments and lead back into them.
4. Mark your next novena in the calendar. Pick a feast from the list above that matters to you.
5. Pray for someone else. The best novena many people ever pray is one offered entirely for another person.

For the whole art of daily prayer, from the Our Father to contemplation, read our guide on how to pray. To pray with the Church through the decades of the Rosary, see how to pray the Rosary.

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