Catholic Prayers and Devotions During Cancer

People expect illness to deepen their prayer life. Often it does the opposite, at least at first. Treatment days run long. Steroids wreck sleep. Fatigue makes concentration impossible. Fear makes the mind skid. Someone who prayed a rosary every evening for thirty years finds they cannot get through a decade, and quietly concludes they are failing.

That experience is so common that most of the practical Catholic devotional tradition is built for it. Short forms, repeated forms, and prayers other people say on your behalf are not concessions for the spiritually weak. They are the normal equipment.

• The Jesus Prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. Or just Lord, have mercy. Repeated on the breath, it works in an MRI scanner where nothing longer will.
• One decade. A decade of the rosary is a complete unit. Many people pray one on the drive in and one during the infusion, and do not attempt the rest.
• A single line. Into your hands. Be with me. Not my will. Repetition is not a lower form of prayer; it is most of the tradition.
• A written prayer read aloud by someone else. On days when you cannot produce words, being read to is easier than reading.

Peregrine Laziosi is the one most people mean when they ask about a patron saint for cancer. A fourteenth-century Servite friar, he is said to have had a tumour on his leg that was to be amputated, and to have recovered after a night of prayer before a crucifix. Many parishes hold a Saint Peregrine Mass or healing service for the sick, and the shrines associated with him are used heavily by cancer patients. Ask your parish whether one is held near you; they are usually well attended and specifically for people in your position.

Others commonly invoked include Our Lady of Lourdes, whose feast on 11 February is also the World Day of the Sick; Saint Luke, traditionally a physician; Saint Camillus de Lellis and Saint John of God, both associated with the care of the sick; and Saint Damien of Molokai for those who feel isolated by illness. Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Jude are widely invoked in desperate situations.

Asking a saint to pray for you is intercession — asking someone to pray alongside you — rather than an alternative channel of treatment. It is worth saying that plainly, because the distinction gets lost in the more commercial corners of devotional publishing.

Anyone who feels that their prayer has become angry, bitter, or accusatory should read the Psalms before concluding they have gone wrong. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me is in the book, and it is the line Christ quotes from the cross. Complaint, exhaustion, and demands for an explanation are all inside the Church's own prayer book.

The Catechism is similarly unsurprised by the emotional wreckage of illness: it says outright that illness "can lead to anguish, self-absorption, sometimes even despair and revolt against God."

There are stretches in serious illness where nothing works. The mind is too tired, the fear is too loud, or the whole thing has gone flat and silent. This is described extensively in the Christian spiritual tradition and it is not evidence of anything about your faith.

Practical responses that people find help:

• Ask other people to pray for you and let that be the arrangement for a while.
• Ask a chaplain or a parish visitor to pray with you rather than praying alone.
• Keep something physical — a rosary in the pocket, a medal, a card — for the days when words are not available. Most hospitals will let you keep a rosary or medal with you during procedures; ask, and ask again before surgery.
• Let the liturgy carry it. Mass on the room television, an audio rosary, or a recorded office asks nothing of you.

First, on healing services and novenas for a cure: pray for whatever you want to pray for. But the Catechism includes a sentence worth holding on to in advance, because it is the one that protects people afterwards — "even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses."

Second, on anything being sold. Blessed objects, water from shrines, and Mass cards are freely given or offered for a modest offering. If someone is charging significant money for a healing product or a guaranteed intercession, that is a commercial transaction wearing devotional clothing, and it is worth being suspicious of.

Ask what they want prayed for rather than assuming it is cure. People in treatment often want prayer for something much more specific: getting through a particular week, sleeping, being able to eat, a scan result, a difficult conversation with a child. Praying for the thing they actually named tends to be received very differently from praying for the thing you would want in their place.