For when you want to be the one who does not add to it. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. It is called St Francis's in every prayer book in the world, and it first appeared in a small Paris magazine in December 1912, with no name on it. Both things are true, and the second does not spoil the first.
La Clochette, 1912
Nine pairs — hatred and love, offence and pardon, discord and union — and in every one you are the thing that goes between. Not bring peace but make me an instrument of it, which is a smaller and harder request. Then it turns and asks not to be consoled, not to be understood, not to be loved, which is a strange thing to pray and the reason the prayer is remembered.
It ends on four reversals: giving is receiving, forgetting yourself is finding, pardoning is being pardoned, dying is rising. It reads like the Gospel with the stories taken out.
This is the page where the site's habit of checking pays off, and it is worth saying plainly. There is no trace of this prayer before December 1912, when it was printed in French, unsigned, in La Clochette, the little bulletin of a Paris devotional league run by a priest named Esther Bouquerel. Not in Francis's writings — which survive, and are well studied — not in his early biographers, not in seven hundred years of Franciscan devotion. Nothing.
It got his name in the 1920s, when a Franciscan in Reims printed it on the back of a holy card with his picture on the front. From there it went into La Croix, into a papal audience, into English, and — in the Second World War — everywhere, as a prayer for peace at a time people needed one. By 1945 it was St Francis's, and nobody has been able to take it back.
So: an unknown French Catholic in 1912 wrote something so like what Francis would have said that the world decided he had. That is not a fraud. It is the same thing that made Patrick's Breastplate Patrick's.
It is the prayer non-Catholics know. Margaret Thatcher quoted it on the steps of Downing Street in 1979; Mother Teresa had it read at the Nobel ceremony; it is sung in every hymnal that has hymns. It is said at twelve-step meetings by people who do not know it is Catholic, and at funerals by people who do not know it is not medieval.
None of that is undone by the date. A prayer is not good because a saint wrote it; the Salve Regina has no known author either. It is good because a century of people have found it true, and that is the test this whole site runs on.