The Litany of Loreto (Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

The Litany of Loreto is a prayer of call and answer: one voice names Mary by one of her titles, and everyone replies with a short plea. It takes about five minutes, at home before an image of Our Lady or in church.

With others. One person leads. The litany opens by asking God’s mercy, and in those first lines everyone repeats each plea after the leader. For the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost and the Trinity, the leader names God and all answer “have mercy on us.” Then come Mary’s titles: the leader says “Holy Mary,” “Mother of Christ,” “Tower of ivory” and the rest, and after each one all answer “pray for us.” Three lines to the Lamb of God turn the prayer back to Christ, and all answer “spare us, O Lord,” “graciously hear us, O Lord” and “have mercy on us.” The leader reads the versicle (V.), everyone answers with the response (R.), and the leader says the closing prayer, to which all say Amen.

Alone. Say both halves yourself, slowly. Because the answer never changes, the mind is free to stay with each name, and it is fine to stop at a title that catches you before going on.

With children. A child needs only three words, “pray for us,” so the litany is often the first prayer a small child can say with the family. Let an older child take the leader’s part, and pause at “Health of the sick” or “Queen of the family” to name someone at home or far away who needs prayer.

The Litany of Loreto is named after the Holy House of Loreto, a shrine a short way south of Ancona, near the Adriatic, honored by tradition as the Nazareth home in which the Word was made flesh. Litanies to Mary are older than the shrine’s fame. The oldest one the Catholic Encyclopedia knew in 1910 is in a twelfth-century manuscript at Mainz, and the centuries after it produced many more, long and varied; in Venice they were sung in processions in times of plague.

The Loreto text took shape among those litanies, and the Catholic Encyclopedia thinks it probable that it became the custom of the Holy House toward the end of the fifteenth century. Records show litanies sung there in 1531, 1547 and 1554. The oldest printed copy known, from Dillingen in Germany around 1558, presents itself as the litany of Our Lady “as said every Saturday at Loreto,” and handbooks for pilgrims spread it far beyond Italy.

Then it was nearly lost. In 1571 St. Pius V reformed the Little Office of Our Lady and left its litanies out, and the clergy of Loreto, afraid their own text was now forbidden, drew up a new litany made of phrases from Scripture, set to music in 1575. Rome declined to impose it, and the old text returned. On July 11, 1587, Pope Sixtus V, deeply devoted to Loreto, approved the litany in the bull Reddituri and urged preachers everywhere to spread it. In 1601, when Clement VIII forbade the publication of new litanies, the Litany of Loreto was expressly kept.

The litany that Sixtus V approved has kept growing, and most of its newer titles answer something the Church was living through at the time.

Queen of the most holy Rosary. The Dominicans had added it by 1614. The Congregation of Rites allowed it to the Confraternity of the Rosary in 1675, and Leo XIII prescribed it for the whole Church on December 24, 1883.

Queen conceived without original sin. Pius IX granted it to the diocese of Mechlin, in Belgium, in 1846. After he defined the Immaculate Conception in 1854, Rome allowed one diocese after another to add it, until it was prayed everywhere.

Mother of good counsel. Leo XIII added it by a decree of April 22, 1903. The old Marian litany of St. Mark’s in Venice had long called Mary Mater veri consilii, Mother of true counsel.

Queen of peace (1917). On May 5, 1917, in the middle of the First World War, Benedict XV wrote to his Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, asking that the bishops of the whole world add “Queen of peace, pray for us.”

Queen assumed into heaven (1950). Pius XII had it added after “Queen conceived without original sin” by a Congregation of Rites decree of October 31, 1950; the next day, November 1, he defined the dogma of the Assumption.

Mother of the Church (1980). St. Paul VI declared Mary Mother of the Church on November 21, 1964, at the close of the third session of the Second Vatican Council. In 1980 the Holy See permitted its use in the litany, and since 2018 the Church has kept the memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church, on the Monday after Pentecost.

Queen of the family (1995). St. John Paul II added it in 1995, his second title for the litany after Mother of the Church.

Mother of mercy, Mother of hope and Solace of migrants (2020). On June 20, 2020, the memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, informed the presidents of the bishops’ conferences that Pope Francis wished these three titles to be inserted. The letter gives the reason: in a time with so many causes of uncertainty and fear, God’s people feel all the more their need to turn to Mary with love and trust. The first comes after “Mother of the Church,” the second after “Mother of divine grace,” and the third after “Refuge of sinners.”

The titles of the Litany of Loreto come in groups: Mary as Mother, then as Virgin, then a run of images, then her care for us in our needs, and last her titles as Queen. Some images come from Scripture and many from the Latin poetry of the Middle Ages, as the Catholic Encyclopedia notes. You do not need to understand every one to pray them, but a few are worth knowing.

Holy Mother of God. The first title after her name, and the root of all the others. Elizabeth greeted her as “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43).

Mother of the Church. From the cross, Jesus entrusted his mother to the beloved disciple: “Behold thy mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own” (John 19:27).

Tower of David, Tower of ivory. Both come from the love song of the bridegroom and the bride: “Thy neck, is as the tower of David” (Canticle of Canticles 4:4) and “Thy neck as a tower of ivory” (Canticle of Canticles 7:4). Strength and beauty, both of them gifts of God.

Ark of the covenant. The ark kept the tablets of the Law; Mary carried the Lord himself. In the Apocalypse, as soon as “the ark of his testament was seen in his temple” (Apocalypse 11:19), the next sign appears: “A woman clothed with the sun” (Apocalypse 12:1).

Gate of heaven. Jacob woke from his dream of the ladder and said of the place: “this is no other but the house of God, and the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:17). Through Mary, the King of heaven came to us.

Health of the sick, Refuge of sinners, Solace of migrants, Comforter of the afflicted, Help of Christians. Here the litany turns to our needs. The newest of these titles remembers that the Holy Family knew exile: Joseph “arose, and took the child and his mother by night, and retired into Egypt” (Matthew 2:14).

The titles of Queen. Mary is Queen of angels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, confessors and virgins, and of all saints. The confessors are the saints who bore witness to Christ without dying for him, first under persecution and later by heroic holiness. Her own song gives the measure of her greatness: “he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48).

The Litany of Loreto can be prayed on any day of the year, but three times belong to it in a special way.

October. On September 1, 1883, in the encyclical Supremi apostolatus officio, Leo XIII ordered that from October 1 to November 2 of that year every parish pray five decades of the Rosary “with the addition of the Litany of Loreto.” The October Rosary, and the litany at its close, grew from that order. For the mysteries to meditate on each day of the week, see the mysteries of the Rosary.

May. In the West, May is kept as Mary’s month (Directory on Popular Piety, n. 191). It falls mostly within the fifty days of Easter, and the Directory suggests that its devotions show Mary with the first disciples waiting for the Holy Spirit, when “all these were persevering with one mind in prayer with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus” (Acts 1:14). A family can pray the litany each evening of May before a statue of Our Lady with a few flowers, and many parishes pray or sing it at their May crowning.

Saturdays. Of all the days of the week, Saturday is the one dedicated to Mary (Directory, n. 188), and Saturday was the day the litany was sung at Loreto.

The Latin below is the official list of the Litaniae Lauretanae, with the three invocations of 2020, as the Italian bishops’ conference published it in its bulletin of August 31, 2021, after the Holy See’s letter. The versicle and the closing prayer, Concede nos famulos tuos, are the Latin printed beside the English in the 1904 prayer book, with its æ written as ae.