The Miracle Prayer

The prayer opens with the words “Lord Jesus, I come before you just as I am.” What follows is, in our own summary, not in Fr. Rookey’s words, a sequence of eight short steps. Each is a thing the Church has always asked of anyone who comes to Christ, and each has deep roots in Scripture.

1. Coming as I am. No preparation, no pretending: the prayer begins where the person praying actually is.
2. Sorrow for sin. It says sorry, repents, and asks forgiveness. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us the sins” (1 John 1:9).
3. Forgiving others. In Jesus’ name, it forgives everyone who has done wrong to the one praying. Christ ties the two together: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matthew 6:14).
4. Renouncing evil. It renounces Satan, the evil spirits and all their works. This is the renunciation every Catholic makes at Baptism, when the candidate “explicitly renounces Satan” (CCC 1237). It is said to Jesus. It gives no command to any spirit.
5. Giving the whole self. It gives the entire self to Jesus, now and forever, invites him in, and accepts him as Lord, God and Savior.
6. Asking to be healed and changed. It asks him to heal, change and strengthen the one praying, in body, soul and spirit, to cover them with his Precious Blood and to fill them with the Holy Spirit. God promised exactly this change of heart through Ezekiel: “I will also give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you” (Ezekiel 36:26).
7. Love, praise, thanks and a promise. It tells Jesus of love, praise and thanks, and promises to follow him every day of life.
8. Asking the saints for help. It closes by asking Mary, Mother and Queen of Peace, St. Peregrine, “the cancer saint,” and all the angels and saints to help.

Peter Rookey was born on October 12, 1916, in Superior, Wisconsin. He entered the Order of Friar Servants of Mary, the Servites, as a boy of thirteen in 1930, and was ordained a priest on May 17, 1941. From 1948 to 1953 he was at the Servite priory of Benburb in Northern Ireland, where he began the ordinary Catholic practice of blessing people after Mass — and people began to report being healed when he prayed for them. He served the order in Rome in the 1950s, then in Belgium and Germany, and in the missions of the Missouri Ozarks, before returning to Chicago in 1984. In 1986 he founded the International Compassion Ministry, which took him to healing services across the world for the rest of his life.

He was clear about whose work it was. Asked about his “gift,” he answered, as his death notice recalls, “It is God’s work, not mine,” adding that God does the healing and he only prays. He died on September 10, 2014, at Our Lady of Sorrows Monastery in Chicago, aged 97, a priest for seventy-three years. The healings people reported at his services are their own testimonies, not findings of the Church.

Fr. Rookey attached a short instruction to the prayer, and it is worth reading closely because of what it does not say. In summary: say it faithfully, whatever you feel, and when you come to mean every word with all your heart, “something good spiritually will happen” to you; you will meet Jesus, and he will change your life. The promise is about the heart. It names no illness that will be cured, no deadline, and no number of days.

So the way to pray it is slowly, and daily, for as long as it takes to mean it. Many people pray it:

• Once a day, ideally at the same time, as a daily renewal of Baptism.
• Before Confession, since it already walks through sorrow, forgiveness and a new start; and after it, as thanksgiving.
• For someone else, by praying it in their name, especially someone who is sick and cannot pray it themselves.
• Alongside the sacraments and medical care, never in place of them. Fr. Rookey prayed with the sick; he did not tell them to stop seeing their doctors.

Search for a miracle prayer and you will soon find versions with instructions attached: say it for three days, or nine times, and your request will be granted “without fail”; then publish it, or pass it on, or it will not work. These instructions are not in Fr. Rookey’s prayer. They come from chain letters and classified-ad “thank you” notices, and they have attached themselves to several different prayers, including prayers to St. Jude and to the Holy Spirit.

The Catechism answers them directly: “To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (CCC 2111). A prayer is not a mechanism, and God is not a vending machine. The Church asks a searching question of any prayer that is all about results: “What is the image of God that motivates our prayer: an instrument to be used? or the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ?” (CCC 2735).

None of this means that asking for a miracle is wrong. Jesus told us to ask: “Ask, and it will be given you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened for you.” (Matthew 7:7). It means that God answers as a father, not as a machine, and that the answer can be more than we asked. The Catechism quotes an early monk on exactly this: “Do not be troubled if you do not immediately receive from God what you ask him; for he desires to do something even greater for you, while you cling to him in prayer” (CCC 2737).

Some needs are bigger than anything human effort can reach: a diagnosis, a child in danger, a marriage at its end, a debt that cannot be paid. Scripture gives such prayers their model at Cana. When the wine ran out, Mary said only, “They have no wine,” and then to the servants, “Whatever he says to you, do it” (John 2:3, 5). She named the need, trusted her Son, and left the how to him. The angel told her at the Annunciation, “For nothing spoken by God is impossible” (Luke 1:37).

If the urgent need is your own safety, or someone else’s, or you are thinking of ending your life, please tell someone who can help you first; prayer can wait a few minutes.

Fr. Rookey’s ministry was with the sick, which is why so many people meet his prayer at a hospital bed. It is right to ask God for a miracle of healing: the Gospels are full of people who did, like the blind man by the road to Jericho, whom Jesus asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51). But the Church is honest about what she knows: “even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses” (CCC 1508). Pray for healing with your whole heart, and keep every appointment with the doctor.

A miracle, in Catholic teaching, is not magic and not a reward for the right words. Jesus’ miracles were signs: “The signs worked by Jesus attest that the Father has sent him. They invite belief in him. To those who turn to him in faith, he grants what they ask” (CCC 548). The same paragraph warns that they “are not intended to satisfy people’s curiosity or desire for magic.” And even Jesus did not take away every suffering: “he did not come to abolish all evils here below, but to free men from the gravest slavery, sin” (CCC 549).

That is why Fr. Rookey’s prayer starts with sin and forgiveness rather than with the request. The miracle the Church is surest of is the one it names first: a heart turned back to God. Outward miracles happen, and the Church investigates some of them with great care. But a changed heart is the one she can promise to anyone who asks for it honestly, because God has already promised it.

When a prayer is answered, the Gospel adds one more step. Of ten lepers healed, one came back: “One of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice” (Luke 17:15). Thank God, and tell someone.

Several other prayers go by the same name, and people often mean one of these:

• St. Anthony’s “miracle prayer” is the Si quaeris (“If then you ask for miracles…”), a responsory written by the Franciscan Julian of Speyer in 1233 and still sung in Padua every Tuesday. See the prayer to St. Anthony.
• Padre Pio’s “secret weapon” is the Efficacious Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which he prayed every day for those who asked his prayers. See the Padre Pio novena.
• The St. Peregrine prayer, for someone with cancer, which Fr. Rookey’s prayer echoes at its close.
• “The prayer that never fails” is a nickname for the Memorare, taken from its line that no one who fled to Mary’s protection “was left unaided.” It is a nickname, not a promise.