Quick Answer
The Prayer of St. Francis, also called the Peace Prayer, begins "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love." It is one of the most loved prayers in the world and is widely associated with St. Francis of Assisi.
However, modern scholars agree that St. Francis almost certainly did not write it. The earliest known appearance is in a small French Catholic magazine called La Clochette in 1912. The attribution to St. Francis spread later, after the prayer was printed on the back of a card bearing his image during the First World War.
The full text of the Peace Prayer
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
Line by line
An instrument of peace
The opening asks for a posture, not a result. I do not ask to be peaceful. I ask to be used as a tool of peace, even if my own life is messy. That is a relief, because it means I do not have to have my life in order before I can be useful.
Sow love, pardon, faith, hope, light, joy
The six paired opposites are not vague positive thinking. Each one is a specific assignment. When I encounter hatred today, I sow love. When I encounter injury, I extend pardon. The prayer turns my attention outward and gives me concrete jobs.
Not so much to be consoled as to console
This is the hardest line. Most of us walk into a room hoping to be understood and feel loved. The prayer asks me to invert that: walk in looking for who I can console, who I can understand, who I can love first. Then trust that the consolation, understanding and love will come back to me anyway, often from places I did not expect.
It is in giving that we receive
The closing trio is the spiritual logic of the whole prayer. The economy of the kingdom is upside down: you receive by giving, you are pardoned by pardoning, you are born by dying. Every line of the prayer is teaching this same shape.
Who really wrote the Peace Prayer
The prayer first appeared, anonymously and in French, in the December 1912 issue of La Clochette, a small publication of a Catholic devotional society in Paris called La Ligue de la Sainte Messe, edited by Fr. Esther Bouquerel. There is no record of its existence before that.
During the First World War, the Franciscans printed it on a small card with an image of St. Francis on the front and the prayer on the back. The visual association stuck. By the 1920s and 1930s the prayer was being attributed to St. Francis directly in American Catholic publications, then in mainstream culture. By the time it was sung at the funerals of Mother Teresa, Princess Diana and others in the late twentieth century, almost no one questioned the attribution.
Why does it not appear in any of Francis's own writings from the 1200s? Because he did not write it. The earliest collected works of St. Francis, compiled centuries before 1912, contain nothing like it. The prayer fits his spirit beautifully, but the words are about seven hundred years younger than the man.
So why is it still called the Prayer of St. Francis
Because the imagery suits him. Francis of Assisi spent his life literally trying to be an instrument of peace, walking barefoot across war lines, preaching to birds, founding a community built on poverty and reconciliation. The unknown French priest who wrote the prayer in 1912 captured Francis's posture so well that the world quietly handed his name back to the words.
How I pray it as a daily examen
I read the prayer slowly once, then I go back and ask one question per pair:
- Where today have I encountered hatred? Did I sow love or did I match it?
- Where today have I been injured? Did I move toward pardon or rehearse the grievance?
- Where today have I met despair, in others or in myself? Did I carry any hope into it?
- Where today did I want to be consoled? Could I have consoled instead?
It takes about five minutes. It is the most consistent spiritual practice I have, and it has changed how I show up in small rooms more than any retreat I have ever been on.
A short version for a busy day
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace today. Where I find hate, let me bring love. Where I find pain, let me bring patience. Where I find fear, let me bring quiet trust. Amen.
A blessing in the spirit of the prayer
May you sow more love than you collect today. May you understand more than you demand to be understood. And may the peace you give away find its way back to you tonight. Amen.
The takeaway: why it still matters
Even with the historical footnote, the prayer of St. Francis still carries the spirit of the saint better than almost any other devotional in circulation today. Whether Francis actually wrote it is a fair question for historians; whether the prayer changes the way you walk into a room is a fair question for you. Pray it for a month and judge it by the second.
