The St. Gertrude Prayer and Prayers for the Souls in Purgatory

When to say it. Any time; it takes twenty seconds. Many say it daily, after the Morning Offering or at night, and many say it on hearing of a death. In November, the month the Church gives to the holy souls, many say it every day of the month. Some pray it on Rosary beads in place of the Hail Marys; that is a private practice, free to anyone, not a required form.

For one person. Nothing stops you holding a particular person in mind while you say it, or adding their name at the end.

There is a deeper reason to leave the number alone. Since 1967 the Church does not even measure her own partial indulgences in days or years: Paul VI decreed that a partial indulgence “will henceforth be designated only with the words ‘partial indulgence’ without any determination of days or years” (Indulgentiarum doctrina, norm 4). A count of souls per recitation claims a precision the Church herself has renounced. And to expect a result from the mere saying of words is what the Catechism calls superstition: “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).

None of this makes the prayer less worth saying. What the Church does teach is better than a number: that “our prayer for them is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective” (CCC 958). Pray it as often as you can, and leave the counting to God. This is the same position the site takes on Catholic prayers for the dead, where the St. Gertrude prayer first came up.

From then on she gave herself to Scripture, the liturgy and prayer, and to writing. Her surviving works are The Herald of Divine Love, The Revelations and the Spiritual Exercises. She died at Helfta on November 17, 1301 or 1302, aged about 46. Pope Benedict XVI, who devoted a catechesis to her in 2010, called her “one of the most famous mystics, the only German woman to be called ‘Great’”, and said her life shows that “the heart of a happy life, of a true life, is friendship with the Lord Jesus.” Her day in the Church’s calendar is November 16.

Her link with the holy souls comes from her visions, in which she prays for the dead and is shown that such prayer helps them. It is the ordinary Catholic instinct, lived intensely: in the communion of saints the living and the dead are one family, and charity does not stop at a grave.

So purgatory is not a lesser hell. Everyone there is saved; what remains is the last of the purifying that love does. St. Paul speaks of someone who “will be saved, but as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:15), and the Catechism roots the Church’s prayer for the dead in the Old Testament, where Judas Maccabeus has sacrifice offered for fallen soldiers: “Therefore he made the atoning sacrifice for those who had died, that they might be released from their sin” (2 Maccabees 12:45; CCC 1032).

That same paragraph names what helps them: “From the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God. The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance undertaken on behalf of the dead” (CCC 1032). Above all the Mass: which is exactly what the St. Gertrude prayer leans on, and why Catholics ask a priest to offer a Mass for someone who has died.

For a daily prayer in your own words, something like this:

Merciful Father, remember the souls of all who have died in Your friendship and are waiting to see Your face. Remember especially N., and those who have no one left to pray for them. Finish in them the good work You began, and bring them into the light of Your presence. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

The psalm the Church has prayed for the dead longest is Psalm 130, the De profundis, “Out of the depths I have cried to you.” A printable set of prayers for a graveside, a funeral or an anniversary, with a place to write the names of your dead, is on prayers for the dead. And if the death is recent and the grief is yours, not only theirs, there are prayers for that too: a prayer for grief.

A plenary indulgence also asks for three conditions: sacramental confession, Holy Communion and prayer for the Pope’s intentions, together with freedom from attachment to any sin, even venial (norm 20). The three conditions may be fulfilled several days before or after the work, though Communion and the prayer for the Pope are best made on the day itself. One confession can serve for several plenary indulgences; each one needs its own Communion and its own prayer for the Pope. A plenary indulgence can be gained once a day. On any other day of the year, visiting a cemetery and praying for the dead, or praying the Eternal Rest, carries a partial one.

In 2020, because of the pandemic, the Apostolic Penitentiary allowed the cemetery indulgence to be moved to any day of November; that was a decree for its year, not the standing rule. What an indulgence is, and what “plenary” does and does not mean, is on plenary indulgences explained.

A simple way to keep it: write down the names of your dead at the start of the month; visit a cemetery on one of the first eight days; ask for a Mass to be offered for them; and say the St. Gertrude prayer each day until the month is out. None of it is obligatory. All of it is charity toward people who can no longer help themselves and who, the Church believes, remember those who help them.