Catholic prayer for grief

When someone we love dies, the words often stop coming. That is when the Church's old prayers help most: they have been prayed by mourners for generations, and they say what we cannot. The prayers below are all in the public domain and printed word for word, with their sources: prayers for the grieving from the 1888 Manual of Prayers, a prayer for a deceased mother or father, the Eternal Rest and Psalm 129, and a few lines of Scripture. Pray them slowly. One line may be all you can manage today, and one line is enough.

A prayer for grief

The Manual of Prayers published by order of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1888 has a short section called "Prayers for the use of Mourners." This is the first of them:

O Almighty God, who knowest the weakness and frailty of our nature: We beseech Thee to give unto us, Thy servants, whom Thou hast stricken with this sorrow, such measure of Thy grace as shall enable us to bear it with humility, resignation, and submission to Thy divine will. Grant that no impatient murmuring or repining thoughts may find a place in our hearts: that we may not sorrow, as those who have no hope. Let not our grief exceed the bounds of reason and religion; but so temper it, we beseech Thee, with the consolations of Thy Holy Spirit, that whatever we may want in outward consolation, we may find in the inward rest of perfect submission to Thy holy will, and unshaken trust in Thy loving mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

It does not ask God to take the grief away. It asks for grace to carry it, and for the comfort of the Holy Spirit where human comfort runs out.

A prayer in great sorrow

Sometimes grief is not quiet. The same manual has "Prayers in Great Sorrow" for the first raw days, and they are honest about how it feels:

O Almighty God, I fall down before Thee in the agony of my soul. Thou hast taken my beloved one from mine eyes, I have none to help me, my heart is desolate. O comfort me, for I am very greatly troubled. Teach me, O God, in this awful hour of affliction, in this great bereavement, in this most bitter day, to have patience and Christian resignation. Teach me to bow meekly to Thy will, that my affliction may not utterly break me down, that I may be able to bear it. Thou knowest my sufferings, my sorrows, my tears; look upon me and succor me. Enable me to bear this weight of trial, for of myself I am unable to bear it. O pity me, Good Lord; pity me, most Gracious Father: for Christ's sake turn Thou Thy face towards me, and mercifully accept my prayer. Amen.

And when you can only cry out, the shortest of them:

O most Mighty, most merciful Father, have mercy on me; have mercy on me, Good Lord. O do Thou bear me up, succor me, strengthen me in my hour of tribulation.

A prayer for the loss of a loved one

The third of the mourners' prayers looks ahead, to the day we will see them again. Where it says "him," say "her" or the person's name.

O Almighty God, Judge of the living and the dead, so fit and prepare us, we beseech Thee, by Thy grace, for that last account which we must one day give; that when the time of our appointed change shall come, we may look up to Thee with joy and comfort, and may at last be received together with him whom Thou hast now taken from us, and with all that are near and dear to us, into that place of rest and peace where Thou shalt Thyself wipe away all tears from all eyes, and where all our troubles and sorrows shall have an end, through the merits and for the sake of Jesus Christ, our Blessed Saviour and Redeemer. Amen.

Then pray for the one you have lost, in the words the Church has used for centuries:

Eternal rest grant unto him (her), O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him (her). May he (she) rest in peace. Amen.

Prayers for a deceased mother or father

Bishop Richard Challoner's Garden of the Soul, the most loved English Catholic prayer book for two centuries, gives this prayer "For Father and Mother" among its prayers for the dead (1872 edition). It is a translation of the old Roman Missal's collect for deceased parents.

O God, who hast commanded us to honour our father and mother, have compassion, in thy mercy, on the souls of my father and mother; forgive them their sins, and grant that I may see them in the joy of eternal brightness. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

For one parent, say "the soul of my mother" or "of my father."

The best-known grief for a mother in all Christian writing is St. Augustine's. St. Monica died at Ostia in 387, asking her sons only this: "Lay this body anywhere... This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be." St. Augustine tells in Book IX of the Confessions that he held back his tears at her funeral, was "most grievously sad in secret all the day," and finally let himself weep. In J. G. Pilkington's translation:

And then little by little did I bring back my former thoughts of Your handmaid, her devout conversation towards You, her holy tenderness and attentiveness towards us, which was suddenly taken away from me; and it was pleasant to me to weep in Your sight, for her and for me, concerning her and concerning myself.

Then he did what she asked, and prayed for her, asking his readers to remember "Monica, Your handmaid, together with Patricius, her sometime husband" at the altar. Grieving children have prayed for their parents in his company ever since.

More prayers for a deceased father, mother, husband, wife or child, with the history of why the Church prays for the dead, are on our prayers for the dead page.

Psalm 129, the De profundis

Psalm 129 (130 in most modern Bibles) is the Church's psalm for the dead, and it is a mourner's psalm too: a cry from the depths that ends in hope. This is the Douay-Rheims text:

Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Let thy ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities: Lord, who shall stand it. For with thee there is merciful forgiveness: and by reason of thy law, I have waited for thee, O Lord. My soul hath relied on his word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord. From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord. Because with the Lord there is mercy: and with him plentiful redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.

A prayer for the afflicted

This short prayer is in the Key of Heaven (Baltimore, 1901), under "A Prayer for the Afflicted." It is a good prayer to say for anyone who is grieving: a friend, a parent, a widow down the street. The book closes it with the Church's usual ending, "through Christ our Lord."

O almighty and everlasting God, the Comforter of the sorrowful, and the support of those who are afflicted, give ear to the prayers of such as call on Thee in their tribulation; that, finding Thy mercy present with them in their necessities, their mourning may be turned into joy.

Scripture for those who grieve

From the Book of Wisdom (3:1-3), read at many Catholic funerals, in the Douay-Rheims:

But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure was taken for misery: And their going away from us, for utter destruction: but they are in peace.

And from the Gospel of John (11:25-26, 35), at the tomb of Lazarus:

Jesus said to her: I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live: And every one that liveth, and believeth in me, shall not die for ever. Believest thou this? ...And Jesus wept.

Our Lord knew Lazarus would rise within the hour, and he wept anyway. Grief is not a failure of faith. It is the price of love, and Christ paid it with us.

The saints who grieved, and whom we ask

• Our Lady of Sorrows. No one has grieved as Mary did, standing at the cross and holding her Son's body. We ask her to stand beside us at every grave. Many mourners find the Seven Sorrows Rosary a comfort.
• St. Martha and her sister Mary of Bethany, who said to Jesus what every mourner says: "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."
• St. Monica and St. Augustine, for those who have lost a mother, a son or a husband.
• St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, who nursed her husband William until he died of tuberculosis in Italy in 1803, and later buried two of her daughters. She is a patron of widows.
• Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, who buried four of their nine children; Zélie herself died of cancer in 1877, when their daughter Thérèse was four.
• St. Joseph, who by tradition died in the arms of Jesus and Mary, patron of a happy death.

How the Church helps us grieve

• Have a Mass offered. The Mass is the Church's greatest prayer for the dead. Ask your parish to offer one for the person you have lost, on the anniversary or any day.
• Keep praying for them. The Catechism (958) teaches that our prayer for the dead "is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective." Love does not end at the grave; it keeps working.
• Keep November. All Souls' Day on November 2 and the whole month of November belong to our dead. Visit the cemetery, light a candle, write their names in the parish book of remembrance.
• Let others carry you. Talk to your priest. Many parishes have bereavement ministries. Grief that will not lift, or thoughts of not wanting to go on, are a reason to call a doctor as well as a priest.

On the third day the women came to the tomb with spices for a dead man and found angels instead. That is where Christian grief is headed. Until then, let us pray for those we have lost and for each other: Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.