The Mary, Undoer of Knots Novena

The novena is prayed with the Rosary, and every day has the same shape. Only the meditation changes.

1. Name the knot. One situation, plainly: this estrangement, this marriage, this debt, this habit.
2. Make the Sign of the Cross and pray an Act of Contrition, in the form you know (the traditional one begins “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee”).
3. Pray the first three decades of the Rosary, with the mysteries of the day.
4. Read the meditation for the day from your novena booklet, or bring the intention for the day from the list below.
5. Pray the last two decades.
6. Close with the prayer to Mary, Undoer of Knots.

That takes about twenty-five minutes. If a whole Rosary each day is more than you can manage, pray one decade with the meditation and the closing prayer; a novena kept faithfully in a small form is better than one abandoned on day three. If the Rosary itself is new to you, the guide to how to pray the Rosary walks through it, and the mysteries of the Rosary gives the set for each day of the week.

The closing prayer in most booklets begins “Virgin Mary, Mother of fair love, Mother who never refuses to come to the aid of a child in need…”. It asks Mary, whose heart is moved by mercy, to take into her hands the knot you name, to intercede with her Son for it, and to untie it for the glory of God. It circulates in slightly different wordings, none of them with a named author or translator, so we do not reproduce one here; pray the version in your booklet, and keep to it for the nine days.

If you have no booklet, this short prayer of our own asks the same thing, in the same order: it asks Mary to pray, and it asks God to act.

Booklets give a meditation for each day. If you have none, or want a second thread, these are nine intentions of our own, each with a line of Scripture, to bring to the pause after the third decade:

1. Naming the knot. Say plainly what is tangled and how long it has been. “Let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
2. The knot of resentment. “even as Christ forgave you, so you also do” (Colossians 3:13).
3. Knots in a marriage. The words you keep repeating, the ones you never say.
4. Knots in a family. The argument whose start nobody remembers. “Whatever he says to you, do it” (John 2:5).
5. Knots of habit. What has grown around itself and will not let go.
6. Knots of money and work. Debts, paperwork, a job that has seized up.
7. Knots of fear. “Don’t you be afraid, for I am with you” (Isaiah 41:10).
8. Knots of faith. Doubt, dryness, a prayer that feels unanswered. “I believe. Help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
9. Thanksgiving and patience. For whatever has moved, and for the patience to let the rest move in God’s time. “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Where the knot is a marriage, the prayer for my marriage can be prayed alongside the novena.

The image of the knot is eighteen centuries old. St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, writing around the year 180, compared Mary with Eve:

“And thus also it was that the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith.” (Against Heresies III.22.4)

The Second Vatican Council quotes the same thought (Lumen Gentium 56), and so does the Catechism: “The knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience: what the virgin Eve bound through her disbelief, Mary loosened by her faith” (CCC 494). It rests on St. Paul’s comparison of Adam and Christ: “as through the one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one, many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). Mary’s yes, “let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38), is where the untying began.

So the devotion is not a novelty dressed in a new title. It is one of the oldest things the Church says about Mary, turned into a picture.

The picture hangs in the church of St. Peter am Perlach in Augsburg, in southern Germany, on an altar given in 1700 by a canon of the city, Hieronymus Ambrosius Langenmantel. It is attributed to the painter Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner. Mary stands as the woman of Revelation 12, clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet and twelve stars about her head, with the dove of the Holy Spirit above her. Her foot is on the serpent, for the promise of Genesis: “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring” (Genesis 3:15). An angel hands her a long ribbon full of knots; she works them loose; another angel takes the ribbon from her, smooth. At the foot of the picture, a small scene shows an angel leading a traveller to a church, which the church’s own guide suggests was a wish of the donor.

A story is told about why it was painted: that the donor’s grandparents, Wolfgang Langenmantel and Sophia Rentz, were close to separating, and that around 1612 a Jesuit at Ingolstadt, Fr. Jakob Rem, took the ribbon from their wedding and prayed before an image of Mary, untying its knots one by one, and the marriage was saved. It is a good story, and it is how the painting is usually introduced. Treat it as a story. The church’s own description does not tell it, and research cited by the Diocese of Eichstätt found no link between the Rem episode and the painting, and dated both the story and the title “Undoer of Knots” to the later twentieth century.

The devotion reached the world through Jorge Bergoglio. It is often said that he saw the painting in Augsburg while studying in Germany. He did not: in a 2017 interview with the German weekly Die Zeit he said he had never been to Augsburg. He knew the image from a Christmas card that a nun sent him during his months in Germany in 1986, and he began sending the card to others. In Buenos Aires a copy was painted by Ana Betta de Berti and enthroned in the parish of San José del Talar on December 8, 1996, and pilgrims come to it on the 8th of every month. From Argentina the devotion spread through Latin America and, after his election, everywhere.

As pope he preached on the image’s meaning. At the Marian Day of the Year of Faith, on October 12, 2013, he spoke of Mary untying the knots of sin with her faith, and said: “All the knots of our heart, every knot of our conscience, can be undone.” On May 31, 2021, he closed a month-long marathon of the Rosary in the Vatican Gardens before a copy of the Augsburg image.

It is a Catholic devotion, prayed in Catholic churches, before an image that has hung in a Catholic church for more than three centuries, and Pope Francis prayed the Rosary before a copy of it in the Vatican Gardens. Like every novena it is a private devotion, which Catholics are free to pray, and everything in it is ordinary Marian piety: the Rosary, contrition, and asking Mary to pray for us. The Catechism calls the Rosary an “epitome of the whole Gospel” (CCC 971).

What it is not is a guarantee. No novena obliges God to untie a particular knot by the ninth day, and some copies that circulate online promise exactly that, or ask you to pass the prayer on. Ignore both. The Catechism calls it superstition to attribute the power of prayers to their mere external performance (CCC 2111). Most knots took years to tighten, and most take longer than nine days to loosen. What it asks of the one praying comes first: to stop pulling, and to let her untie it.

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 came to know the image while studying in Germany in 1986, from a Christmas card a nun sent him, 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.

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.