The Sign of the Cross: the Prayer and How to Make It

Catholics of the Latin rite make it with the right hand, the way the Baltimore Catechism teaches it: forehead, breast, then the left and right shoulders.

1. “In the name of the Father,” touch your forehead.
2. “and of the Son,” touch the middle of your chest.
3. “and of the Holy Spirit,” touch your left shoulder, then your right.
4. “Amen.” Bring your hands together, or let them rest.

Most people hold the hand open with the fingers together. Some join the thumb and first two fingers for the Trinity, an old custom shared with the East. The movement matters less than the attention: make it slowly enough to see the cross you are tracing, and say the words as words to God, not as a reflex.

One God, three Persons. The words are Christ’s own, from his last command to the apostles: “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19, Douay-Rheims). Notice that it says name, not names. The Baltimore Catechism points this out: “The words, In the name, express the Unity of God,” and the three that follow name the three Persons. Every time you make the sign, you profess in a single breath what the Catechism calls “the central mystery of Christian faith and life” (CCC 234).

The cross of Christ. The gesture draws on your own body the shape of the cross on which Christ died for you. St. Paul wrote: “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14, Douay-Rheims). To sign yourself is to say, without a word of explanation, that you belong to the Crucified and are not ashamed of him.

Latin Catholics go from the left shoulder to the right. Christians of the Byzantine tradition, Orthodox and Eastern Catholic alike, go from the right shoulder to the left. They also join the tips of the thumb, index and middle finger for the three Persons of the Trinity, and fold the other two fingers into the palm for the two natures of Christ, God and man. Both are the same prayer and the same cross, made with the same faith. Armenian and other Oriental Orthodox Christians, like Latin Catholics, go from left to right.

At Mass, when the priest or deacon announces “A reading from the holy Gospel,” he traces a small cross with his thumb on the book, then on his own forehead, lips and breast. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal adds that the people do the same: he makes the cross “on his forehead, mouth, and breast, which everyone else does as well” (GIRM 134).

At the beginning and end of prayer. It opens morning and night prayers, the Morning Offering, novenas and litanies, and it closes them. The Rosary begins with it on the crucifix, before the Apostles’ Creed, as the guide to praying the Rosary shows. Some people also make it at the words “Glory be to the Father,” where the Glory Be names the same three Persons.

At Mass. Mass opens with it: priest and people, all standing, make the Sign of the Cross together, and the people answer “Amen” (GIRM 124). It ends with it too: the priest blesses the people with the Sign of the Cross, naming the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and they answer “Amen” (GIRM 167). Most people sign themselves as he does.

In Latin it is called the Signum Crucis. This is the text the Holy See prints in the Compendium of the Catechism, and the words the priest says at the start of Mass in Latin (GIRM 124):

A mark on the forehead. Scripture speaks of God’s people marked on the forehead. In Ezekiel’s vision the Lord says to “mark Thau upon the foreheads of the men that sigh, and mourn” (Ezekiel 9:4, Douay-Rheims), and in the Book of Revelation an angel tells the four angels to do no harm “till we sign the servants of our God in their foreheads” (Revelation 7:3, Douay-Rheims). The early Christians read these passages as pointing to the sign they made themselves.

Tertullian, early 200s. The North African writer Tertullian describes it as the ordinary habit of Christians in his day, in his treatise The Chaplet (De Corona, chapter 3), which the Catholic Encyclopedia dates to 211: “At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign.” In the next chapter he admits that no verse of Scripture commands it: it came from tradition, was strengthened by custom and kept by faith.

Yes. The Baltimore Catechism calls it “the chief sacramental used in the Church” (Q. 294). The Catechism says the sacramentals, the sacred signs the Church gives us, “always include a prayer, often accompanied by a specific sign,” and names the sign of the cross and holy water among those signs (CCC 1668). It also says what sacramentals do: by the Church’s prayer, they “prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (CCC 1670).

That is why it is a prayer and never a charm. The Catechism names the mistake plainly: “To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance” apart from the heart is superstition (CCC 2111). A hurried scribble across the chest does nothing by itself. Making it on autopilot is not superstition, only distraction, and God is patient with it: when you notice, make the next one slowly. A cross made slowly, with faith, turns you toward God, and the Catechism adds that it “strengthens us in temptations and difficulties” (CCC 2157). The strength is God’s; the sign is how you ask for it. The Church also attaches a partial indulgence to making the Sign of the Cross devoutly with its usual words (Enchiridion of Indulgences, grant 28).

A prayer to Christ crucified, to say before you make the sign: