Novena
The St. Peregrine Novena
Nine days of prayer for someone facing cancer, begun on the day of a scan or a diagnosis, or on any day.
Pray for someone with cancer ›
The St. Peregrine novena is nine days of prayer asking St. Peregrine Laziosi, patron of people with cancer, to pray for someone who is sick, named each day. It goes alongside medical treatment, never in place of it, and it is a prayer, not a promise of a cure.
Quick facts
- Prayed to:
- St. Peregrine Laziosi
- Feast day:
- May 1
- When to pray:
- Begin on April 22 so that the ninth day falls on April 30, the eve of his feast on May 1. It is far more often prayed at whatever moment the need arises, which is how most people come to it.
- Prayed for:
- Those living with cancer and other serious illness, and those who care for them.
The St. Peregrine novena prayer
This is the novena prayer as EWTN prints it. Say it once on each of the nine days, naming the illness and the person at the pause. It asks St. Peregrine to obtain grace from God and to pray for you; the healing it asks for is God’s to give.
Glorious wonder-worker, St. Peregrine, you answered the divine call with a ready spirit, and forsook all the comforts of a life of ease and all the empty honors of the world to dedicate yourself to God in the Order of His holy Mother.
You labored manfully for the salvation of souls. In union with Jesus crucified, you endured painful sufferings with such patience as to deserve to be healed miraculously of an incurable cancer in your leg by a touch of His divine hand.
Obtain for me the grace to answer every call of God and to fulfill His will in all the events of life. Enkindle in my heart a consuming zeal for the salvation of all men.
Deliver me from the infirmities that afflict my body (especially... )
Obtain for me also a perfect resignation to the sufferings it may please God to send me, so that, imitating our crucified Savior and His sorrowful Mother, I may merit eternal glory in heaven.
St. Peregrine, pray for me and for all who invoke your aid.
Many close each day with an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be. The phrase “the Order of His holy Mother” is the Servite Order, the Servants of Mary, whom St. Peregrine joined; that is why the prayer ends with Christ’s “sorrowful Mother”.
Prayer to St. Peregrine for the sick
The second traditional prayer, also from EWTN, is the one most often printed on St. Peregrine prayer cards and prayed for a particular sick person. It asks him to “ask of God and Our Lady” the cure of the people you name:
O great St. Peregrine, you have been called ‘The Mighty,’ ‘The Wonder-Worker,’ because of the numerous miracles which you have obtained from God for those who have had recourse to you.
For so many years you bore in your own flesh this cancerous disease that destroys the very fibre of our being, and who had recourse to the source of all grace when the power of man could do no more. You were favoured with the vision of Jesus coming down from His Cross to heal your affliction. Ask of God and Our Lady, the cure of the sick whom we entrust to you.
(Pause here and silently recall the names of the sick for whom you are praying)
Aided in this way by your powerful intercession, we shall sing to God, now and for all eternity, a song of gratitude for His great goodness and mercy.
Amen.
Short prayers to St. Peregrine for cancer
These are shorter prayers of our own, for the particular days of an illness. Each asks God for what only he can give, and asks St. Peregrine to pray for the one who is ill. A diagnosis can bring fear that is bigger than any prayer. If it becomes more than you can carry, or you find yourself thinking about ending your life, please tell someone you trust today, and do not face it alone.
After a diagnosis
Lord, we have heard the word we were afraid of.
Stay close to (name) and to all of us who love them.
Guide the doctors, and give us courage for the first steps.
St. Peregrine, pray for us.
Amen.
Before surgery or treatment
Father, I place (name) in your hands today.
Steady the hands of the surgeon and the nurses,
let the treatment do its work,
and give us peace while we wait.
St. Peregrine, pray for us.
Amen.
For someone caring for the sick
Lord Jesus, you were sick and you were visited.
Give me strength for the appointments, the nights and the waiting,
and patience when I have none left.
St. Peregrine, pray for me.
Amen.
When there is no cure
Lord, we asked for healing, and you know how much.
Now give (name) your peace, freedom from pain,
and the people they love around them.
Let them not be afraid, for you are with them.
St. Peregrine, pray for them.
Amen.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4). For more, see the prayer for those battling cancer and the page on the patron saint of cancer.
How to pray the St. Peregrine novena, and when
- Name the person and the illness. Keep the same intention for all nine days.
- Begin with the Sign of the Cross.
- Say the novena prayer, pausing at “especially…” to name the illness.
- Add the prayer to St. Peregrine or one of the short prayers above, if you like, and an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be.
- Close with the Sign of the Cross.
When to begin. St. Peregrine’s day is May 1, the day he died in 1345. He is not on the Church’s general calendar. To finish on the eve, pray the novena from April 22 to April 30. The Servite Order, his own community, keeps his feast on May 4, so Servite parishes often pray it from April 25 to May 3. Both are right. In practice this novena is most often begun on a particular day that has nothing to do with the calendar: the day of the scan, the diagnosis or the first treatment. Begin then.
If you are praying it for someone else, tell them, if they would welcome it. Knowing that nine days of prayer are being said for you by name is its own comfort. And pray it more than once if the illness is long; many people pray it again before each round of treatment.
Who was St. Peregrine?
Peregrine Laziosi was born at Forlì, in northern Italy, around 1265. In his youth Forlì was in open conflict with the papacy, and the Servite tradition says he sided against it, until an encounter with St. Philip Benizi, prior general of the Servants of Mary, turned his life around. (The famous detail that Peregrine struck St. Philip in the face first appears in a Servite chronicle of 1618, three centuries later; treat it as part of the story, not the record.) At about thirty he entered the Servite Order at Siena, and he spent most of his long life back in Forlì, known for his penance and his care for the poor and the sick.
The story that made him the patron of cancer patients comes from his earliest Life. In his sixties he developed an open wound on his leg, described as a cancer, and the physician decided the leg must be amputated. On the night before the operation, the story goes, he dragged himself to the crucifix in the chapter room and prayed, fell asleep, and saw Christ come down from the cross and touch the leg. In the morning the wound was gone. This is the tradition of his biographers: it was first written down about 1350 by a fellow friar who knew him, in a text now lost, and survives in the Life written by Niccolò Borghese in 1483. The Church has not ruled on it as history, and the page tells it as what it is, the story behind the patronage.
He died at Forlì on May 1, 1345, at about eighty, and is buried there in the Servite church. He was beatified in 1609 and canonised by Pope Benedict XIII on December 27, 1726. Servites carried his devotion around the world, and in the United States his National Shrine is at the Servites’ Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica in Chicago, where a Mass for the Sick is celebrated each month. His order’s devotion to the sorrowing Mother of Christ runs through his prayers; see Our Lady of Sorrows.
Will the St. Peregrine novena heal cancer?
No prayer comes with a guarantee, and a novena to St. Peregrine is not an alternative to oncology. The Church asks the sick to pray and to be treated. Scripture puts both in the same breath: “My son, in your sickness don’t be negligent, but pray to the Lord, and he will heal you,” and a few lines later, “give place to the physician, for truly the Lord has created him. Don’t let him leave you, for you need him” (Sirach 38:9, 12). The Catechism calls health one of the “precious gifts entrusted to us by God” that we must take reasonable care of (CCC 2288). Keep every appointment. Pray on the way to them.
No one can promise that the novena will bring a recovery, and the Church is honest about that: “even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses”, and St. Paul himself had to hear from the Lord, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (CCC 1508; 2 Corinthians 12:9). That is not a sign of too little faith, and it is not God ignoring the novena. What it also asks for is the strength to go through the illness without being alone, and that is a real thing to ask for.
Ask your parish priest for the Anointing of the Sick, the sacrament for exactly this. “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the presbyters of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord” (James 5:14). It is not only for the dying.
“He took our infirmities, and bore our diseases.”
Go deeper
What is this novena?
The St. Peregrine Novena is nine days of prayer for someone facing cancer or another serious illness. It is one of the few novenas most people meet at a specific moment rather than through the calendar: someone is diagnosed, and a relative hands them this. Peregrine was a fourteenth-century friar who developed a cancer of the leg severe enough that amputation was scheduled. The account holds that he spent the night before in prayer before a crucifix, and that the wound was found healed in the morning. He lived another two decades. That is the story behind the patronage, and it is why he is invoked by people facing exactly that kind of news. It is worth being careful and honest about what this novena is. It is not an alternative to treatment, and the Church has never proposed it as one. Praying it alongside oncology is the normal Catholic practice and there is no tension in it. If you are choosing between a novena and a doctor, that is a decision the Church would tell you not to make. It is also worth saying that Peregrine was healed and most people who pray his novena are not, at least not in the way they asked. The Church does not treat that as failure or as insufficient faith. What the novena asks for is healing, and with it the strength to keep going, which is not the same thing and is not nothing.
Keeping the nine days
Pray it whenever the need arises rather than waiting for the feast day. This is a novena of circumstance. If you are praying for someone else, tell them. A novena prayed quietly on someone’s behalf is a real gift, and knowing that nine days of prayer are being said for you does its own work. Name the person and the specific outcome you are asking for. Then, and this is the harder half, add the request for what to do if the answer is no. Novenas prayed with only one acceptable outcome tend to end badly. And keep the medical care going. Prayer and treatment are not competitors, and no one should ever feel they must choose.
Alongside the novena, for someone in treatment now: a prayer for those battling cancer — and for the people who sit with them.
A Servite of our own time, the healing priest Fr. Peter Rookey, closed his short prayer of surrender by asking St. Peregrine’s help: the Miracle Prayer — what it asks, line by line, and why “never fails” is not part of it.
Questions people ask
What is the St. Peregrine novena prayed for?
For those living with cancer and other serious illness, and for the people caring for them. It is most often prayed at the moment of a diagnosis rather than on a fixed date.
Why is St. Peregrine the patron of cancer patients?
He was a fourteenth-century friar with a cancer of the leg so severe that amputation had been scheduled. The account holds that he prayed through the night before the surgery and the wound was found healed in the morning. He lived roughly another twenty years.
When is the St. Peregrine novena prayed?
It can be prayed at any time and usually is. To close on the eve of his feast day, May 1, begin on April 22.
Should I pray this instead of seeking treatment?
No. The Church has never proposed prayer as an alternative to medical care, and praying alongside treatment is ordinary Catholic practice. If you feel you are being asked to choose between the two, that is not what the Church teaches.
When is St. Peregrine’s feast day?
May 1, the day he died in 1345; he is not on the general calendar of the whole Church. The Servite Order, to which he belonged, keeps his feast on May 4. To end the novena on the eve of May 1, pray it from April 22 to April 30.
What is the prayer to St. Peregrine?
The novena prayer begins “Glorious wonder-worker, St. Peregrine”, and the prayer for the sick begins “O great St. Peregrine, you have been called ‘The Mighty,’ ‘The Wonder-Worker’”. Both are printed in full above, with shorter prayers for a diagnosis, for treatment and for carers.
Does the St. Peregrine novena cure cancer?
No prayer is a guaranteed cure, and the novena is prayed alongside treatment, never instead of it. The Catechism says plainly that even the most intense prayers do not always obtain healing (CCC 1508). What it asks for is healing, and strength and peace in the illness, as the Church’s own prayers for the sick do.
Who is St. Peregrine the patron saint of?
People with cancer and other serious illness, and those who care for them. The patronage comes from the tradition that a cancerous wound on his leg was healed the night before it was to be amputated.
