The Mary, Undoer of Knots Novena
Nine days for the tangles that will not come loose on their own
The Mary, Undoer of Knots Novena is nine days of prayer asking Mary, Undoer of Knots to intercede, traditionally prayed for situations that have tangled rather than broken: an estrangement, a marriage under strain, a habit that has grown around itself, a family argument nobody can now remember the start of, work or paperwork that has seized up. The feast day is No fixed feast; prayed whenever it is needed. AngelGuard publishes when to begin, how the nine days work, and what the novena asks for.
Quick facts
What is the Mary, Undoer of Knots novena?
The Mary, Undoer of Knots Novena is nine days asking Our Lady to loosen a situation that has tangled. Its image is literal: a Baroque painting in the church of St. Peter am Perlach in Augsburg, made around 1700 by Johann Georg Schmidtner, showing Mary patiently working a long knotted ribbon loose while angels hold either end. The idea underneath it is much older. St. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, put it as a comparison: the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by the obedience of Mary. The painting simply made that visible, and the devotion grew locally around it. Its spread beyond Germany is recent and traceable to one person. Jorge Bergoglio saw the painting while studying in Germany in the 1980s, brought the devotion back to Argentina, and promoted it there; it moved through Latin America from him, and much further after he became Pope Francis. What distinguishes it from most novenas is the kind of trouble it addresses. A knot is not a break. It is something that got tangled slowly, usually with nobody intending it, and cannot be undone by pulling harder — which is exactly what people do. The devotion is a request for patience applied to something that has stopped responding to force.
How to pray it
Name one knot. The temptation is to bring everything at once, and everything at once is not a knot, it is a heap. Pick the specific tangle. Do not decide in advance how it should come loose. A knot is untied at whichever end will move, not the end you are holding, and novenas prayed with a fixed solution attached tend to be prayed for the solution rather than the situation. Expect it to take longer than nine days. This is a devotion about patience and it would be strange for it to reward impatience. The nine days set the intention; the loosening happens on its own schedule. And where the knot involves another person, pray for them by name rather than about them. It changes what the nine days do to you, which is often where the first movement actually shows up.
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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