Prayer of St Francis

The attribution history of the Prayer of St Francis is now settled fact, thanks to the French historian Christian Renoux, whose 2001 study traced every known early printing. The prayer first appeared in December 1912 in La Clochette, a small devotional magazine published in Paris for a eucharistic association, under the heading of a beautiful prayer to say during Mass, with no author named. No earlier text of it exists anywhere, in French, Latin, Italian or any other language, and nothing resembling it appears in the writings of Francis of Assisi, who died in 1226, or in any Franciscan source of the following seven centuries. The association with Francis began by accident of layout. Around 1918 a French priest printed the prayer on the back of a card bearing an image of the saint, and readers began taking the picture for an attribution.

Within a decade the prayer was circulating as the Prayer of St Francis, and the label proved unshakeable, repeated in devotional books, hymnals and journalism ever since. Renoux judged that the actual author was probably connected with the magazine itself, possibly its founding editor, but no attribution can be proven, and the honest statement is that the most famous Franciscan prayer in the world is an anonymous French composition of the early twentieth century.

Whoever wrote it built the prayer on two elegant structures. The first half is a series of sowings, asking that where there is hatred the speaker may sow love, where injury pardon, where doubt faith, where despair hope, where darkness light, where sadness joy. The second half turns inward through paradox, asking to console rather than be consoled, to understand rather than be understood, to love rather than be loved, and closes with the triple reversal that it is in giving that we receive, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to eternal life. The text's career outran every other modern prayer. It circulated widely during the two world wars, when its petitions matched the moment, and it crossed denominational lines with unusual ease, adopted by Protestants, Anglicans and Catholics alike and quoted far beyond Christianity.

Mother Teresa had it recited at her Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1979, and Margaret Thatcher quoted it on the steps of Downing Street the same year. Sebastian Temple's 1967 hymn setting, Make Me a Channel of Your Peace, carried it into congregational song, and that setting was sung at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. The false attribution, once corrected, leaves the prayer no poorer, a modern text good enough that the world assumed a saint had written it.