The Divine Mercy Novena
Nine days from Good Friday to the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday
The Divine Mercy Novena is nine days of prayer asking The Divine Mercy to intercede, traditionally prayed for mercy, for oneself and for the whole world. Each of the nine days carries a different group of people to be prayed for by name. The feast day is Divine Mercy Sunday, the Sunday after Easter. AngelGuard publishes when to begin, how the nine days work, and what the novena asks for.
Quick facts
What is the The Divine Mercy novena?
The Divine Mercy Novena is nine days of prayer running from Good Friday to the Saturday before Divine Mercy Sunday. It comes from the writings of St. Faustina Kowalska, a Polish sister who died in 1938, and it has a structure no other novena has: each day is assigned a different group of souls. The order runs from the widest circle inward and then outward again. All mankind, especially sinners. Priests and religious. Devout and faithful souls. Those who do not believe in God and those who do not yet know Christ. Those separated from the unity of the Church. The meek and humble, and children. Those who venerate and glorify God’s mercy. The souls in purgatory. And on the ninth day, souls that have grown lukewarm, which Faustina records as the hardest of all to bring. That last detail is why the novena is worth understanding rather than simply performing. It does not end with the most sympathetic case. It ends with indifference, including one’s own. Divine Mercy Sunday itself was instituted for the universal Church by John Paul II in 2000, on the day he canonised Faustina. The distinction worth keeping is between what the Church has established and what belongs to Faustina’s private revelation: the feast, and the indulgence attached to it under the usual conditions, are the Church’s act. The particular promises recorded in her Diary are not the same kind of thing, and honest devotion does not treat them as if they were.
How to pray it
Begin on Good Friday, which is the point of the timing. The novena starts at the moment of the crucifixion and runs through the silence of Holy Saturday and the whole octave of Easter, arriving at the feast having crossed the entire Triduum. Pray the day’s assigned group even when it is not the one you would have chosen. The fourth day asks for those who do not believe, the fifth for those separated from the Church, the ninth for the lukewarm. A novena that only prays for people we already like is not this novena. Many pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy alongside it, at three in the afternoon, which is the hour the tradition marks. That is a custom rather than a rule. And for the feast itself, the Church’s conditions are the ordinary ones for any indulgence: sacramental confession, Holy Communion, and prayer for the pope’s intentions. Those are what she asks. Anything stated more dramatically than that is coming from somewhere other than the Church’s own documents.
About the prayer text
Several versions of this novena circulate, and the wording is traditional rather than something to be improvised. Rather than publish a text we have not verified against a reliable Catholic source, this page gives you the structure, the timing, and the intention. Take the words themselves from your parish, your missal, or a Catholic publisher, and stay with one version for the full nine days.
Frequently Asked Questions
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