The St. Dymphna Novena

This is the prayer most people mean by “the St. Dymphna prayer”. It is addressed to Jesus, and asks him to hear the prayers of St. Dymphna and of his Mother for the people you name. We give it word for word as it has long been printed, in its older “Thou” form, from the page of catholictradition.org that credits the St. Dymphna devotion kept by the Franciscan Fathers of Mount Vernon, New York. Newer booklets change “Thou” to “You”; the prayer is the same.

These are shorter prayers of our own, for the days when a long prayer is too much. They ask St. Dymphna to pray for you, and they ask God for what only he can give. Anxiety and depression are illnesses, and the first thing to do with an illness is to take it to someone who can treat it. If you have not yet spoken to a doctor, that is part of this prayer too.

A novena is nine days of the same prayer. To pray this one:

1. Name the intention. Your own suffering, or the person you are praying for, by name. Keep the same intention for all nine days.
2. Begin with the Sign of the Cross.
3. Say the prayer to St. Dymphna above, once.
4. Add the day’s intention from the list below, if you like, and an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be.
5. Close with the Sign of the Cross.

It takes about five minutes. The shrine’s own form, with the Litany and a virtue a day, is described above; either is right. To end on the eve of her feast, begin on May 6; the ninth day is May 14, and May 15 is the feast itself. Most people pray it whenever it is needed, and that is the better reason. If you miss a day, simply carry on. On a bad day, one line of the prayer is enough. A novena is not a test you can fail.

If you want each day to carry its own intention, these nine are ours, each with a line of Scripture to keep in mind:

1. For anyone who is suffering in mind today, and has told no one. “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
2. For those living with anxiety. “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, I give to you. Don’t let your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful” (John 14:27).
3. For those living with depression. “The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart” (Psalm 34:18).
4. For doctors, nurses, therapists and counsellors, and for the grace to accept their help. “Honor a physician according to your need with the honors due to him, for truly the Lord has created him” (Sirach 38:1).
5. For families and carers who are worn out. “Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15).
6. For those in hospital, and for those who have no one to visit them.
7. For those living with addiction, and for everyone who is afraid of relapse. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
8. For those who have died by suicide, and for the people who loved them. The Church does not despair of their salvation and prays for them (CCC 2283).
9. For the grace to keep going, and to be patient with yourself on the way.

Almost everything told about St. Dymphna’s life comes from one source: a Life written in the thirteenth century by Pierre, a canon of the church of Saint-Aubert at Cambrai, at the request of Bishop Guy I of Cambrai (1238–1247). Pierre says himself that he took it from oral tradition, some six centuries after the events.

The story he tells is this. Dymphna was the daughter of a pagan king in Ireland and a Christian mother, and was baptised. When her mother died, her father, broken by grief, wanted to marry his daughter because she looked like her. She fled across the sea with her confessor, a priest named Gerebernus, and they hid near Geel in what is now Belgium. Her father tracked them down. His men killed the priest, and when Dymphna refused him he killed her himself. Tradition says she was about fifteen.

That story should be read as a legend. The Catholic Encyclopedia, written in 1909 by a Catholic historian, says plainly that the narrative “is without any historical foundation”, and that nothing can be concluded from it about her history or even when she lived. What is real is older than the Life: the veneration at Geel, where two ancient sarcophagi were found that tradition holds held the bodies of Dymphna and Gerebernus, one with a brick inscribed with her name. The church of St. Dymphna at Geel burned in 1489, and the church that replaced it, consecrated in 1532, still stands. Her feast is May 15, and she is listed on that day in the Roman Martyrology.

None of that makes the devotion less real. A saint whose life we know only in outline can still be a true intercessor, and the Church has invoked her at Geel for some eight centuries. It only means the story of the king and his daughter should not be told as if it were a chronicle.

What happened at Geel after her cult began is not legend. It is one of the best-documented stories in the history of mental health care.

Pilgrims with mental illness were coming to her shrine certainly by the thirteenth century. By 1480 a small hospice had been built against the side of the church to house them while they made their novenas. When it overflowed, families in the town began taking the pilgrims into their own homes, and that became the custom: people with mental illness lived with Geel families, worked alongside them and ate at their tables, instead of being locked away. The earliest surviving written records of patients date from 1693. The Church was responsible for the care until 1852, when the Belgian state took it over under medical direction.

At its height, just before the Second World War, almost four thousand boarders lived with families in Geel. The system still runs today as part of the public psychiatric centre OPZ Geel, with more than a hundred boarders living with host families. UNESCO has added Geel’s family care to its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices for intangible cultural heritage.

That is why St. Dymphna is the patron of mental illness: not because of anything in her legend, but because a whole town, praying at her shrine, decided that the people everyone else feared should live in their houses. It is a patronage made of hospitality and medical care together. In the United States, the National Shrine of St. Dymphna in Massillon, Ohio, was dedicated on her feast in 1938 on the grounds of the state hospital there.

No, and the Church has never taught that it does. Scripture tells the sick to pray and to call the doctor, in the same chapter: “Honor a physician according to your need with the honors due to him, for truly the Lord has created him” and “The Lord created medicines out of the earth. A prudent man will not despise them” (Sirach 38:1, 4), and then, “give place to the physician, for truly the Lord has created him. Don’t let him leave you, for you need him” (Sirach 38:12). The Catechism calls life and health “precious gifts entrusted to us by God” that “we must take reasonable care of” (CCC 2288). Taking a prescribed medicine, going to therapy and staying in hospital are ways of doing that.

There is a small scene in Scripture about this. When the prophet Elijah was so exhausted that he asked to die, God did not send him a lecture. “He lay down and slept under a juniper tree; and behold, an angel touched him, and said to him, “Arise and eat!”” (1 Kings 19:5). Sleep and food came first. The rest came after. If you are praying this novena for your own anxiety or depression, let the novena be the prayer that goes with the treatment, and let the treatment be part of the answer.

For prayers from the same place, see the patron saint of mental illness and the patron saint of depression.