Novena to the Holy Spirit

The nine days the apostles spent waiting in the upper room, prayed as they prayed them — one day on the Spirit himself, seven on his gifts, one on what those gifts grow into.

What it's for

Light on something you cannot see your way through, and the courage to act once you can. This is the novena for when the problem is not that you lack information, but that you lack the sight to make sense of what you already have.

Where it came from

The first novena, and the only one in Scripture: Acts describes the apostles keeping to the upper room through the nine days between the Ascension and Pentecost. Every later novena is an imitation of those nine days.

Its present form rests on a specific, datable act. In Divinum Illud Munus, 1897, Leo XIII instituted an annual novena to the Holy Spirit between the Ascension and Pentecost and directed that it be prayed in every Catholic parish in the world. Of everything on this site, this is the item whose standing is easiest to show you.

Structure

Nine consecutive days, about eight minutes each. Day one on the Holy Spirit. Days two to eight on the seven gifts of Isaiah — fear, piety, fortitude, knowledge, understanding, counsel, wisdom — taken from the bottom of the list upward, which is the traditional order and arguably the order they are actually acquired in. Day nine on the fruits of Galatians 5.

When it's prayed

Traditionally the nine days between the Ascension and the vigil of Pentecost, which move each year with Easter.

The text used here

The invocation and versicle are the traditional liturgical form, public domain. Scripture is the Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition. The daily reflections and the petition for each gift are written for praypoint — deliberately, rather than reproducing the English novena text that circulates widely, whose provenance we could not establish. Our rule is that an unsourceable text gets rewritten, not copied.