The Chaplet of Divine Mercy
Prayed on ordinary rosary beads. Every word below — and where it came from.
The Chaplet of Divine Mercy is one of the shortest devotions to learn — about eight minutes on a set of beads most Catholics already own. It is a prayer of offering: you place the sacrifice of Christ before the Father, and ask mercy on the whole world. What follows is the complete chaplet, every word, with nothing left to guess at.
How to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy
It is prayed on an ordinary five-decade rosary. Begin at the crucifix and move through the beads exactly as you would the Rosary — only the words change.
1. Begin
Make the Sign of the Cross. Then, on the opening beads, pray:
- One Our Father
- One Hail Mary
- The Apostles' Creed
2. On each large (Our Father) bead
3. On each of the ten small (Hail Mary) beads
4. Repeat for all five decades
One large-bead offering, then the ten small-bead petitions — five times through, just as the Rosary has five decades.
5. Conclude (three times)
This concluding prayer — the ancient Trisagion, "Thrice Holy" — is said three times. Keep its last words, "and on the whole world": they belong to the prayer as St. Faustina wrote it down (Diary 476). Many close with the Sign of the Cross.
About the words on this page
St. Faustina wrote the chaplet down in Polish (Diary 476), and it was first printed, with an imprimatur, in Kraków in 1937. The large-bead prayer above, and the "O Blood and Water" aspiration below, are word for word the Marian Fathers' own 1944 chaplet card, Corona of Mercy (Stockbridge, Massachusetts; imprimatur of Archbishop Edward Mooney of Detroit, 6 April 1944). The small-bead line is the English printed in The Grail (St. Meinrad, Indiana, August 1949), without its "most," which her Polish does not have; its "Through" renders her dla, literally "for the sake of." The closing line is the ancient Trisagion in its long-standing English, with the chaplet's own ending: the 1944 card stops at "have mercy on us" and leaves out "and on the whole world," which the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy warn must never be dropped. Every line has been checked against her Polish.
Many parish booklets use the Marian Fathers' later translation, which begins "Eternal Father, I offer You…". It is the same prayer. When you pray with others, pray the words they use.
Sources: St. Faustina's Polish text and the history of its first printing (Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy); Corona of Mercy (1944), printed without a copyright notice; The Grail, August 1949, pp. 242–243, public domain (no copyright notice, no renewal on record); the Trisagion in the English G. V. Shann prints in the Book of Needs of the Holy Orthodox Church (London, 1894), p. xxi — "Holy God, holy mighty one, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us" — with "on" for "upon."
The optional opening and closing prayers
Many who pray the chaplet add prayers from St. Faustina's Diary before and after it. They are optional — the chaplet above is complete without them.
Optional opening
Many begin with St. Faustina's prayer "You expired, Jesus…" (Diary 1319), then pray this three times, in the words of the 1944 card:
The prayer speaks to the Blood and Water as they flowed from Christ's pierced side on the Cross (John 19:34) — the wound Catholic devotion has always read as His Heart; the trust is in Him.
Optional closing prayer
Many close with St. Faustina's prayer "Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless…" (Diary 950). The Marian Fathers, who hold the copyright in the English translation of her Diary (© 1987), print both of her prayers in full on their chaplet page.
When to pray it — the Hour of Great Mercy
The chaplet may be prayed at any hour. But it carries a particular weight at 3:00 p.m. — the hour of Christ's death on the Cross, which the devotion calls the Hour of Great Mercy. It is also prayed as a novena beginning on Good Friday and preceding the Feast of Divine Mercy on the Second Sunday of Easter — Divine Mercy Sunday.
Where the Chaplet of Divine Mercy came from
The chaplet was given through the private revelations of St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), a Polish religious sister of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. She recorded the words of the chaplet in her Diary — entries 474–476.
The devotion was examined and approved by the Church, and St. Faustina was beatified on April 18, 1993 and canonized on April 30, 2000, by Pope St. John Paul II — who gave the Second Sunday of Easter the name Divine Mercy Sunday (Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, decree Misericors et miserator, 5 May 2000). As a private revelation, the chaplet is not an article of the Creed; it is a devotion the Church commends, resting on the public, unchanging truths it expresses — the saving Passion of Christ and the boundless mercy of God (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church §§1846–1848).