Novenas
Nine days of prayer for a particular intention, usually to a particular saint.
Nine days of sustained prayer for an intention or in preparation for a feast, echoing the nine days the apostles spent in prayer before Pentecost. Novenas are often attached to particular saints or titles of Mary and flourish at the popular level through printed cards, parish traditions, and family customs. They are petitions with a calendar, and they show Catholic comfort with asking.
A novena is nine consecutive days of prayer for one intention. The number comes from the nine days between the Ascension and Pentecost, and the form is domestic rather than liturgical: it is something a person undertakes, not something a parish schedules, though parishes often run them too.
Most novenas are addressed to a particular saint or under a particular title of Mary, and the choice usually reflects what is being asked for. They are strongly associated with illness, with employment, and with situations that have gone on too long.
The discipline of returning nine days running is much of the point, and people who keep them describe the persistence as the substance rather than the wrapper.
Does it have a text?
Novena texts are enormously varied and mostly modern, written by particular authors and published by particular houses, which puts most of them in copyright. There is no single novena text to publish, and this site holds none.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Catholic
- The Mass — The central act of Catholic worship, fixed in text and repeated daily worldwide.
- The Liturgy of the Hours — The prayer of the psalms at set times of day, obligatory for clergy and open to anyone.
- The Rosary — A counted devotion pairing repeated prayers with meditation on events in the life of Christ.
- Eucharistic Adoration — Prayer before the exposed sacrament, often silent and often for a set hour.
- Catholic personal and meditative prayer — Prayer in a person's own words, and the meditative disciplines the tradition teaches.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.