Prayers for the Sick

When Lazarus fell ill, his sisters did not send Jesus instructions. They sent a single sentence: “Lord, behold, he for whom you have great affection is sick” (John 11:3). It is still the best model for praying for someone you love. Tell God who they are and that they are ill, and trust him with what happens next. The Roman centurion did the same for his servant, asking Jesus to heal from a distance: “Just say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Matthew 8:8). You do not need to be at the bedside for your prayer to reach it.

A hospital stay has its own kind of helplessness: the waiting, the tests, the visiting hours, the phone that might ring. This prayer is for the patient and for everyone around them. Scripture has always honored those who treat the sick as instruments of God: “Then give place to the physician, for truly the Lord has created him,” and the physicians themselves “shall ask the Lord to prosper them in diagnosis and in healing for the maintenance of life” (Sirach 38:12, 14).

Surgery asks for a particular kind of trust: you hand your body to people you have met once, and go to sleep. The Church recognizes it as a moment for the sacrament of the sick; the Catechism says, “It is fitting to receive the Anointing of the Sick just prior to a serious operation” (CCC 1515). If the operation is serious, ask the parish before the day. Then pray this, the night before or in the waiting room:

Some illnesses do not end. The prayer at the top of this page was written for them: for the daily management, the medications and the appointments, “the good days that give false hope and the bad days that steal it back.” The Church does not pretend that such suffering is small. She says that illness is among “the gravest problems confronted in human life” (CCC 1500), and she offers it a meaning: joined to Christ, suffering “acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus” (CCC 1521). That is not a reason to stop asking for relief, or to refuse treatment. It is a reason not to think the hard years are wasted.

A long illness can wear down the one who is sick and the one who cares for them. If it has become more than you can carry, or you find yourself thinking about ending your life, please reach out now:

The Catholic Church’s own prayer for the sick is a sacrament. St. James describes it in the first generation of the Church: “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; and the prayer of faith will heal him who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed sins, he will be forgiven” (James 5:14–15). The Church recognizes in this rite one of the seven sacraments (CCC 1510–1511).

It is not only for the dying. For centuries it was given so often at the very end that it was called “Extreme Unction” (CCC 1512), and many families still wait too long to ask. The Catechism is explicit: the Anointing “is not a sacrament for those only who are at the point of death. Hence, as soon as anyone of the faithful begins to be in danger of death from sickness or old age, the fitting time for him to receive this sacrament has certainly already arrived” (CCC 1514).

Who can receive it. A Catholic who has reached the use of reason and “begins to be in danger due to sickness or old age” (Code of Canon Law, can. 1004). That includes a serious illness, a serious operation (CCC 1515), and the frailty of old age. It can be received again in a new serious illness, or if the same illness gets worse (CCC 1515; can. 1004 §2). It is given even when there is doubt whether the sick person has the use of reason, is dangerously ill, or has already died (can. 1005), and to those who would have asked for it while they could (can. 1006).

Who gives it. Only a priest: “Only priests (bishops and presbyters) are ministers of the Anointing of the Sick” (CCC 1516), and the faithful “should encourage the sick to call for a priest to receive this sacrament.” A deacon or a lay minister can pray with the sick and bring Communion, but cannot anoint.

What happens. The priest lays his hands on the sick person in silence, prays over them, and anoints the forehead and hands with blessed oil, saying: “Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up” (CCC 1513). When it can be arranged, Confession comes before it and Holy Communion after (CCC 1517).

What it gives. “The first grace of this sacrament is one of strengthening, peace and courage to overcome the difficulties that go with the condition of serious illness or the frailty of old age” (CCC 1520). It unites the sick person to the Passion of Christ, forgives sins if they could not go to Confession, and prepares for passing over to eternal life; and it brings “the restoration of health, if it is conducive to the salvation of his soul” (CCC 1532). The Church does not promise the last. She asks for it.

When an illness is ending in death, the prayer changes but does not stop. The Church asks that the dying “be given attention and care to help them live their last moments in dignity and peace,” and adds: “They will be helped by the prayer of their relatives” (CCC 2299). She also insists that “the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted,” and she commends palliative care: “Palliative care is a special form of disinterested charity. As such it should be encouraged” (CCC 2279).

Call the priest while the person can still receive the sacraments. Besides Confession and the Anointing, the Church gives the dying Holy Communion as “viaticum,” food for the journey (CCC 1524). And she has her own prayer for the moment of death, which the Catechism quotes; it can be read aloud at the bedside:

Catholics ask the saints to pray for the sick, as they would ask any friend; the Catechism says, “We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world” (CCC 2683). Three are asked most often.

St. Raphael the Archangel, whose name means “God heals.” In the Book of Tobit he is sent in answer to two prayers made on the same day, by a blind man and by a young woman at the end of her strength: “Raphael also was sent to heal them both” (Tobit 3:17). At the end of the story he reveals who he is: “I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels which present the prayers of the saints” (Tobit 12:15). His feast, with St. Michael and St. Gabriel, is September 29. See the patron saint of healing for his story and prayer.

St. Peregrine Laziosi, the Servite friar of Forlì who died on May 1, 1345, is the patron of people with cancer; the tradition of his early biography tells that he was healed of a wound in his leg the night before it was to be amputated. Many pray the St. Peregrine novena for someone facing cancer or another serious illness.

Our Lady of Lourdes. Since 1993 the Church has kept February 11, her memorial, as the World Day of the Sick, instituted by St. John Paul II. Many of the sick pray to her as “Health of the Sick,” one of her titles in the Litany of Loreto.

Jesus healed the sick constantly; the Gospels are full of it. The Catechism calls him “the physician the sick have need of” (CCC 1503). But it adds a sentence many sites leave out: “But he did not heal all the sick. His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God” (CCC 1505). And of Christian prayer for healing it says, honestly: “even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses” (CCC 1508). St. Paul begged three times to be freed of his “thorn in the flesh” and was told, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

So the Church asks for healing with confidence, and never makes it a test. Some preachers teach that healing is guaranteed to anyone with enough faith, and that a person who stays sick has failed to “claim” it. That is not Catholic teaching, and it lays a cruel second burden on the sick. God is not a mechanism that faith operates. When healing does not come, it is not because the sick person, or the people praying, did not believe hard enough.

Nor is illness something to be commanded out of the body. Every prayer on this page is addressed to God, or asks a saint to pray. The Church prays over the sick; she does not order a disease to leave.

And prayer never replaces medicine. “Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them” (CCC 2288). Scripture tells the sick person to pray and to see the physician, in the same breath: “My son, in your sickness don’t be negligent, but pray to the Lord,” and then “give place to the physician” (Sirach 38:9, 12). Pray for the doctor, keep the appointments, take the treatment, and bring all of it to God.