Pope Francis Prayer for Peace: Full Text & How to Pray

By Hayley Louisa Mark

There is a specific kind of evening that sends a person looking for this prayer. You have read enough of the news. Your own words have run out — the ones you tried earlier, kneeling or driving or lying in the dark, felt thin against the size of what’s happening in the world, and you gave up halfway through. And somewhere in that giving-up a thought arrives, almost shy: I don’t want to make up my own words tonight. I want to borrow someone’s. Words that have already been weighed, already been prayed by people standing in front of the same kind of darkness — and meant it. That is often what is underneath a search for pope francis prayer for peace. Not curiosity about the Vatican. A tired heart that wants to lean on words bigger and older than its own.

I know that exact feeling — the hands open but empty, the longing to say something true about a breaking world without having to invent it from scratch. And here is the quiet relief of it: you don’t have to. The Church has been handing peace down in fixed words for a very long time, precisely so that on the nights you have nothing left, there is still something to say. Pope Francis prayed one such prayer out loud, in a garden, with a man and another man whose peoples were at war. You can pray the very same words tonight.

So this page gives you two things. First, the actual words — Pope Francis’s Prayer for Peace in full, with the story of the night he prayed it, and St Francis de Sales’s gentle “Be at Peace” for when the trouble is closer to home than the headlines. And second, the part most pages skip: how to actually pray a borrowed prayer so it doesn’t slide past you like a paragraph you’ve read — how to make a pope’s words become, for ten honest minutes, your own.

A short way in, before the longer prayers below: Lord God of peace, hear our prayer. We have tried so long to make peace by our own strength, and our efforts have been in vain. Now, Lord, come to our aid. Grant us peace, teach us peace, guide our steps in the way of peace. Amen. — a short breath of the pope francis prayer for peace, adapted from his own words, enough to pray with your eyes closed before you read one more headline.

The story behind the prayer: a garden, two presidents, and a pope who knelt

It helps to know where these words come from, because it changes how they land.

On the evening of 8 June 2014, Pope Francis hosted a remarkable meeting in the Vatican Gardens. He had invited Shimon Peres, then President of Israel, and Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority — two leaders of two peoples with a long, bitter history of war between them — to come, not to negotiate, but simply to pray for peace together. The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was there too. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prayers were each offered, in their own traditions, side by side.

And into that evening Pope Francis spoke the prayer you can read below. It was not a sermon and not a political speech. It was a man standing in front of two presidents whose nations were at war, refusing to pretend he could fix it, and turning instead to God — out loud, with them, in the open air. “We have tried so many times and over so many years to resolve our conflicts by our own powers… But our efforts have been in vain. Now, Lord, come to our aid!”

I find it steadying to remember that the first time these words were prayed, nothing was solved. The wars did not stop the next morning. The prayer was offered anyway — honestly, without guaranteeing a result — by a man who knew exactly how unfinished the world still was when he said Amen. That is permission for the rest of us. You are allowed to pray these words tonight over a situation that will not be fixed by morning, and still mean every syllable.

Pope Francis’s Prayer for Peace, in full

Here is the prayer Pope Francis prayed that evening, in full. Read it slowly — out loud if you can. It is long, and it is meant to be; let it carry you rather than rushing to the end.

Lord God of peace, hear our prayer!

We have tried so many times and over so many years to resolve our conflicts by our own powers and by the force of our arms. How many moments of hostility and darkness have we experienced; how much blood has been shed; how many lives have been shattered; how many hopes have been buried… But our efforts have been in vain.

Now, Lord, come to our aid! Grant us peace, teach us peace; guide our steps in the way of peace. Open our eyes and our hearts, and give us the courage to say: “Never again war!”; “With war everything is lost”. Instill in our hearts the courage to take concrete steps to achieve peace.

Lord, God of Abraham, God of the Prophets, God of Love, you created us and you call us to live as brothers and sisters. Give us the strength daily to be instruments of peace; enable us to see everyone who crosses our path as our brother or sister. Make us sensitive to the plea of our citizens who entreat us to turn our weapons of war into implements of peace, our trepidation into confident trust, and our quarreling into forgiveness.

Keep alive within us the flame of hope, so that with patience and perseverance we may opt for dialogue and reconciliation. In this way may peace triumph at last, and may the words “division”, “hatred” and “war” be banished from the heart of every man and woman. Lord, defuse the violence of our tongues and our hands. Renew our hearts and minds, so that the word which always brings us together will be “brother”, and our way of life will always be that of: Shalom, Peace, Salaam!

Amen.

(This is the prayer as published in English by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — the words from the Vatican Gardens Invocation for Peace, 8 June 2014.)

Notice what it does not do. It does not claim the war is nearly over. It does not blame one side. It begins by admitting failure — our efforts have been in vain — and only then asks. That honesty is why it travels so well into a personal evening: it is built to be prayed by people who have run out of their own answers.

A second, gentler prayer when the trouble is closer than the headlines: St Francis de Sales’s “Be at Peace”

Sometimes the peace you’re reaching for isn’t about nations at all. It’s about tomorrow — the appointment, the result, the conversation you can already feel coming. For that nearer kind of fear, there is an older, quieter set of words, treasured under the name of St Francis de Sales, the gentle 17th-century bishop who wrote so tenderly about an anxious soul.

Be at peace.

Do not look forward in fear to the changes of life; rather look to them with full hope as they arise. God, whose very own you are, will deliver you from out of them. He has kept you hitherto, and He will lead you safely through all things; and when you cannot stand it, God will bury you in His arms.

Do not fear what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you then and every day. He will either shield you from suffering, or give you unfailing strength to bear it.

Be at peace, then, and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations.

(An honest note on this one: this beloved text is best understood as a compilation drawn from St Francis de Sales’s letters and counsel, smoothed over the years into the short prayer we have today. He may never have written it in exactly these words — but it is faithful to his spirit, and the Church has long treasured it as his. I’d rather you know that than pretend it’s a single sentence he penned.)

How to actually pray a borrowed prayer (so it doesn’t just slide past you)

Here is the real work of this page. A famous prayer is easy to read and surprisingly easy to feel nothing while reading. The words are someone else’s; your eyes can run right over them the way they run over a headline. So this is a simple way to slow down and let a pope’s prayer — or de Sales’s — actually become yours for the length of it.

1. Sit, and let your hands fall open in your lap. Both palms up, loosely. You are about to receive words rather than produce them; let your body say so. Take one slow breath before you read a single line, letting it out longer than you drew it in.

2. Read it aloud, even in a whisper. A borrowed prayer was made to be said, not skimmed. Hearing your own voice carry Pope Francis’s words drags them out of the abstract and into your actual room. If you’re somewhere you can’t speak, move your lips silently — it still slows you to the pace of meaning.

3. Stop at the line that snags you, and stay there. You will feel one phrase catch — our efforts have been in vain, perhaps, or defuse the violence of our tongues, or when you cannot stand it, God will bury you in His arms. Don’t read past it. Read that one line three or four more times, slowly, and let it be the part you actually pray. A long prayer often exists to deliver you to a single sentence you needed.

4. Where the prayer says “we” and “our,” put real names in. This is the step that turns recitation into intercession. When Pope Francis prays grant us peace, pause and name the us — your country, the war that’s been on your heart, the two people in your own family who aren’t speaking. When de Sales says do not fear what may happen tomorrow, name your actual tomorrow. The fixed words become a frame; you hang your own life inside it.

5. End with one line of your own — even a clumsy one. After the borrowed Amen, add a single sentence in your own plain words: And Lord, the part I most need is… You’ve leaned on a saint and a pope to carry you up to the door; you can step through it yourself with one honest line. That hand-off — their words, then yours — is what keeps a great prayer from staying someone else’s.

This is not a technique that guarantees a feeling. Some nights the snag never comes and the words stay flat, and you pray them anyway, dry-eyed, trusting they count. They do.

The verses these prayers lean on

Pope Francis’s prayer is steeped in Scripture, sometimes word for word. Knowing the verses underneath it lets you feel why the words carry the weight they do.

Isaiah 2:4 (KJV) — “…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
When the Pope prays to turn our weapons of war into implements of peace, he is leaning directly on this ancient line. It is the oldest disarmament vision there is — not weapons destroyed and left as rubble, but re-forged into tools that grow food. That’s the hope inside the prayer: not merely that fighting stops, but that the very energy of war gets bent toward making things live.

Matthew 5:9 (KJV) — “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
This is why a prayer asking to be an instrument of peace is not wishful thinking but a calling. Jesus does not say blessed are the peaceful — the ones lucky enough to be left alone — but blessed are the peacemakers, the ones who go toward the conflict and work for peace inside it. When you pray Pope Francis’s words and then put your own names into the us, you are quietly taking up that work in your own small corner.

Romans 12:18 (KJV) — “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.”
I love how honest this verse is, and how much room it leaves you. If it be possible — Paul knows it isn’t always. As much as lieth in you — your part, not the other person’s, which you cannot control. It keeps a prayer for peace from curdling into self-blame when peace doesn’t come. You pray, you do your part, you live as peaceably as lieth in you — and the rest you hand back to God, exactly as the Pope did in that garden, knowing the war wasn’t over.

(One thing worth flagging, since searches for “pope” and “St Francis” peace prayers cross over so often: the famous “Make me a channel of your peace” — also called the Peace Prayer of St Francis — was not written by St Francis of Assisi, and never claimed by him in his lifetime. It first appeared anonymously in a small French magazine in 1912, and only later got printed on the back of a holy card bearing his image, which is how his name attached to it. It’s a beautiful prayer. It simply isn’t his, and it isn’t Scripture — so pray it freely, but know what it is.)

One body practice: the candle and the empty hands

The world’s peace is so vast that the body has nowhere to put the praying — which is partly why it can feel like nothing is happening. So this practice gives your prayer something physical to rest on. It is deliberately unlike sitting and breathing through a racing mind; it uses your hands and a single small light.

You’ll want a candle if you have one — a real flame is best, but a tealight, or even a lit phone screen face-up on the table, will do.

Light the one light, and turn off the others. Make the room a little dark, so the single flame is the brightest thing in it. The Pope prays to keep alive within us the flame of hope — let one real flame stand for it in front of you. There is something about a small light in a dark room that the body reads as steadier than any amount of reasoning.
Read the prayer aloud with your hands open toward the flame. Palms up, the way you held them above. You are not gripping anything tonight — not the outcome, not the war, not tomorrow. Let your open hands toward the light be your body’s version of now, Lord, come to our aid.
Name one thing into the flame, then close your hands gently. Choose the single situation heaviest on your heart — the country, the conflict, the person. Say it out loud, simply: “This one, Lord.” Then slowly close both hands, as if cupping the light without touching it, and rest them in your lap. You have lifted it up; now you set it down in hands larger than yours, and you let the closing of your fingers be the letting-go. Blow the candle out when you’re ready, and let that small curl of smoke be the prayer rising and the evening ending.

You are not performing a ceremony that obligates God to act. You are giving a vast, shapeless ache one small, true shape — a light, two open hands, one named thing handed over — so that your body can finally rest from carrying what it was never built to carry.

A note on the science

Two ordinary features of this practice tend to settle the body, and they’re worth naming plainly. First, gazing at a single, gentle light source in a darkened room narrows and softens visual attention; a steady fixation point, rather than the rapid, scanning eye movements that accompany stress and “doomscrolling,” is associated with a calmer, more parasympathetically-dominant state. Second, reading a long, measured text aloud at an unhurried pace naturally slows and regularises the breath — speech requires controlled, extended exhalation — and a slow exhale preferentially engages the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic, “rest-and-recover” branch of the nervous system, easing heart rate and the background stress response. The deliberate hand movements add a small grounding, proprioceptive focus that occupies attention which might otherwise spiral. None of this is a claim about the prayers, the saints, or the events being prayed over; it is a description of bodily stress physiology only, which requires no belief to occur.

The body-science here reflects established neuroscience of the nervous system. What the science actually says about a settled body → · the research behind these pages

An honest word about praying a pope’s prayer

I want to be careful here, because borrowed words from holy people can quietly become something they were never meant to be.

Praying Pope Francis’s exact words is not a more powerful prayer than your own stumbling one — as if the right syllables in the right order were a kind of key that unlocks God where your plain “please, help” couldn’t. That isn’t how any of this works. God is not more moved by a papal cadence than by a sigh you couldn’t finish. The reason to pray a great prayer is not that it twists God’s arm more effectively; it’s that on a night when you have no words, it lends you some true ones to lean on, and joins your small voice to the much larger chorus that has prayed them before you. That’s a real gift. It is not a lever.

And the Pope himself showed us the honesty this requires. He prayed those words in a garden between two warring peoples, and the wars went on. He knew they might. Prayer is relationship, not a transaction that obligates God to deliver peace on your timetable — and if the news is just as dark tomorrow, that is not evidence that you prayed wrong, or chose the wrong saint’s words, or that your faith was too small. The world has been unfinished and aching for a very long time, and the most faithful people who ever lived prayed over it without seeing it healed. Their prayers were real. So is the ongoing pain. You are allowed to hold both, and to rest tonight anyway.

One line worth saying plainly: if what brought you here is not the state of the world but a fear or a dread inside you that has stopped you sleeping, eating, or functioning, please treat that as real and reach for real help alongside these prayers. Talk to your doctor; tell someone you trust; if you are in crisis, contact a helpline in your country — in the US you can call or text 988. A pope’s prayer and a doctor’s help are not rivals. God works through both, and reaching for help is a faithful act, not a failure of one.

For the ordinary weight of a hard world, and a heart that wants words bigger than its own — keep praying these. Lean on them on the empty nights. Then add your one clumsy line at the end, and let yourself be carried by words that were weighed long before you needed them.

A free card with both prayers, ready when the words run out

If it would help to have these somewhere you can actually reach them — on your phone before bed, propped by a candle, tucked into a missal or a journal — I’ve put both prayers onto a single printable card so you’re not searching for them on a heavy night.

Get The Papal Peace Prayer Card: Pope Francis’s Prayer + “Be at Peace,” Printable — free →

It has Pope Francis’s Prayer for Peace in full, St Francis de Sales’s “Be at Peace” beside it, the short way-in prayer for when you only have one breath, and the five steps for praying a borrowed prayer so it actually lands — sized to keep wherever you’ll reach for it.

If you want to go deeper: a journal for the long work of praying for peace

Praying for peace isn’t a one-night thing — the world stays unfinished, and so does the heart. If you want somewhere to keep bringing it to God — to pray for the places and people on your heart by name, day after day, and to notice your own settling over weeks rather than refreshing the news — that’s exactly what our prayer journals are made for.

The Stilling Waves reflective prayer journals give you a guided page for each day: a verse to steady you, a written prayer to lean on when your own words run dry, and quiet room to name what you’re carrying and hand it over. It’s a paid companion for the slow, faithful work of praying for peace without being crushed by how much is still unhealed.

Explore the Stilling Waves prayer journals →

Frequently asked questions

What is the full text of Pope Francis’s Prayer for Peace?
It begins “Lord God of peace, hear our prayer!” and confesses that “we have tried so many times… to resolve our conflicts by our own powers… But our efforts have been in vain,” before asking God to “grant us peace, teach us peace, guide our steps in the way of peace” and to make us “instruments of peace.” It ends “Shalom, Peace, Salaam! Amen.” The full text is set out above — it’s the Invocation for Peace Pope Francis prayed in the Vatican Gardens on 8 June 2014 with the presidents of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

When and why did Pope Francis pray this prayer?
He prayed it on 8 June 2014, at a meeting he hosted in the Vatican Gardens with Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas — leaders of two peoples long at war — gathered not to negotiate but to pray for peace together, with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prayers each offered. The wars did not end the next day, and that’s part of why the prayer is so honest and so usable: it was prayed by someone who knew the world was still unfinished when he said Amen.

Is “Make me a channel of your peace” the same as Pope Francis’s prayer?
No — and it’s a common mix-up. “Make me a channel of your peace” is the famous Peace Prayer often attributed to St Francis of Assisi, but he did not write it; it first appeared anonymously in a small French magazine in 1912 and only later got linked to his name. Pope Francis’s Prayer for Peace is a separate, modern prayer he composed for the 2014 gathering. Both are lovely; they’re simply different prayers from different sources.

How do I pray a famous prayer so it doesn’t just feel like reading?
Sit with open hands, read it aloud (even whispered), and stop at the one line that snags you — read it a few more times and let that be the part you really pray. Where the words say “we” and “our,” put in real names: your country, the conflict on your heart, the people in your own family. Then end with one plain sentence of your own. Borrowing the words is the start; naming your own life inside them is what makes them yours.

Does praying for peace actually change anything if wars don’t stop?
Prayer isn’t a lever that forces history on your timetable, and the news being just as hard tomorrow is not proof you prayed wrong. Pope Francis prayed these very words between two warring peoples and the wars continued — he prayed anyway. Prayer is relationship, not a transaction: you hand the unbearable size of it back to the only One who can hold it all, you do the small part that “lieth in you” (Romans 12:18), and you let yourself rest. Where the weight has become something you can’t sleep or function under, treat it as real and reach for help too.

When You Want to Pray the Words a Pope Prayed: Pope Francis’s Prayer for Peace