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“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” If you have prayed those words, sung them, or heard them read at a graveside, you are in enormous company. After the Lord’s Prayer, it may be the most-prayed prayer on earth.
It is almost certainly not St. Francis of Assisi’s. There is no evidence he wrote it. The prayer appears nowhere in his writings, and nobody has found it in print anywhere before December 1912 — in French, in a small Paris church bulletin, with no author’s name on it at all.
Francis died in 1226. That is a gap of nearly seven hundred years.
Almost everyone believes the Francis version, and it is very easy to see why. The route the prayer actually travelled is a better story than the one printed on the card, and nobody along that route was being dishonest.
Where the Prayer First Shows Up
The earliest known printing is December 1912, in a monthly bulletin called La Clochette — “The Little Bell” — published in Paris by a small devotional society, the Ligue de la Sainte-Messe, the League of the Holy Mass.
It ran on page 285 of issue 12, under a title that tells you exactly what it was for: “Belle prière à faire pendant la Messe.” A beautiful prayer to say during Mass. Not a peace anthem. Not a public statement. A prayer for one person sitting in a pew.
The first line, in French, reads: “Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de votre paix.” Word for word, that is the line the whole world knows.
And it was printed anonymously. No name at the top, no name at the bottom. That single detail is the key to everything that happened next.
The person who established all of this is Christian Renoux, a history professor at the University of Orléans, who published a book-length study of the prayer in 2001: La prière pour la paix attribuée à saint François: une énigme à résoudre — the prayer for peace attributed to Saint Francis, a riddle to be solved. Renoux found that nearly everything printed in La Clochette appears to have come from the pen of the priest who founded and edited it, Father Esther Bouquerel, who lived from 1855 to 1923. So Bouquerel may well be the author.
Nobody can prove it. The honest answer to “who wrote this prayer?” is still: we do not know.
How Francis’s Name Got Attached
Watch the steps. Not one of them is a lie. Every one of them is a small, understandable gap.
1915. A French nobleman, the Marquis Stanislas de La Rochethulon, sent the prayer to Pope Benedict XV. The First World War was a year old and the pope was pleading publicly for peace.
20 January 1916. L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s own newspaper, printed an Italian translation on its front page. And it credited the prayer — not to Francis, but to the association that had forwarded it, a group that described itself as inspired by the testament of William the Conqueror. For a few weeks in 1916, the best-loved prayer of the twentieth century was filed under an eleventh-century Norman king.
Around 1920. A French Franciscan, Father Étienne Benoît, had the prayer printed on the back of a mass-produced holy card — a small devotional card with a picture of St. Francis on the front. He titled it “Prière pour la paix,” Prayer for Peace. He never claimed Francis wrote it. He did not have to. A prayer on the back of a saint’s picture, with no author’s name anywhere on it, becomes that saint’s prayer in about one generation.
22 January 1927. The earliest English version anyone has found appeared in a Quaker magazine in the United States, the Friends’ Intelligencer. The heading above it read: “A prayer of St. Francis of Assissi” — misspelling and all. That is the first known time the prayer carried his name in print.
Then it spread the way things spread in wartime. It turned up in English again in 1936, in a book called Living Courageously by Kirby Page — which was the earliest English printing Renoux’s own study had been able to find, before later quote researchers turned up the 1927 Quaker one. During the Second World War, Archbishop Francis Spellman, who oversaw the chaplains of the United States military, handed out millions of copies.
And in 1967 a South African songwriter named Sebastian Temple, who had joined the Franciscan Third Order, set it to a tune. If you know this prayer as “Make me a channel of your peace,” that hymn is where you know it from. It is not medieval. It is younger than the moon landing.
What the Prayer Was Actually Written For
Read it again knowing it was written to be murmured quietly during Mass, and something in it shifts.
Almost every line asks for the harder direction. Not comfort me, but let me bring comfort. Not let me be understood, but let me understand. Line after line, the prayer refuses to ask God for the thing the person praying actually wants.
That is a strange thing to pray. It is also why it lasted. A prayer that asked God to make other people kinder would have been forgotten by 1913.
And the date sits there quietly. Someone in Paris wrote a prayer asking to be made an instrument of peace in 1912 — two years before the war that would take a generation of French men. Nobody knew. By 1915 it was in a pope’s hands. By 1940 it was in soldiers’ pockets. The prayer did not predict anything. It was simply ready.
What Francis Actually Did
Here is the part that makes this correction worth making, rather than just being right.
Francis left real writings, and one of them does almost exactly what the peace prayer only asks for. Near the end of his life he composed the Canticle of the Creatures, the long song of praise that historians credit as one of the first great poems written in Italian.
Some time after finishing it, he added four more lines — lines blessing those who forgive — specifically to settle a quarrel between the mayor of Assisi and the town’s bishop, two men who had fallen out so badly they had cut each other off completely. Francis was ill. He did not go himself. He sent a friar to sing the new lines in front of both of them.
They made peace.
He did not pray to become an instrument of peace. He wrote a song and sent it into the room.
The oldest version of the idea is older still, and in the King James Bible it takes four words: “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9). Not blessed are the peaceful. Not blessed are the peace-loving. Peacemaker is a job — and the two words the Bible actually uses for peace both mean something closer to repair than to quiet.
Why the Difference Matters
This could be treated as trivia. It is not, for two reasons.
The first is that believing the Francis version is not careless. It is printed on the back of his picture. It is titled with his name in hymnals in a dozen languages. It was taught by people who were taught it themselves, in good faith, all the way back to a priest around 1920 who put a prayer on a card because he found it beautiful. There is no one in that chain to be cross with.
The second reason is better. If Francis did not write it, then somebody else did — and that somebody was most likely an ordinary parish priest in Paris who never signed his name, writing something for ordinary people to say on an ordinary Tuesday morning. The most-prayed prayer of the last hundred years may have no famous author at all. It came from the pew, not the pedestal.
That should make it easier to pray, not harder.
Francis gets handed other people’s words more often than any other saint. The line “preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words” is also not something anyone can find him saying. The same thing happened to Teresa of Avila with “Christ has no body now but yours”, which grew out of a Victorian sermon. It happens to these three because the words sound like them — and the words sound like them because of how they lived.
Jack Wintz, a Franciscan writing in St. Anthony Messenger, put it about as well as it can be put: Francis may not have written the words of the prayer attributed to him, but he certainly lived them.
So keep praying it. Just know that when you do, you are joining an unnamed person who wanted this badly enough to write it down and not sign it.
A Question Worth Sitting With
Which prayer, verse or saying have you always assumed belonged to the person whose name is printed under it? And does finding out change how much you trust it — or not at all? We would genuinely like to hear in the comments.
If This Surprised You, Pass It On
- “Just found out the Prayer of St. Francis isn’t St. Francis. Earliest copy anyone can find is a Paris church bulletin from December 1912 — printed with no author’s name. 686 years after he died.”
- “For a few weeks in 1916 the Vatican newspaper ran the peace prayer and credited it to a group inspired by William the Conqueror. Not Francis. William the Conqueror.”
- “‘Make me a channel of your peace’ is a 1967 hymn by a South African songwriter. The prayer behind it is from 1912 and nobody knows who wrote it. Still praying it though.”
Quick Questions, Straight Answers
Did St. Francis write “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”?
No. There is no evidence St. Francis of Assisi wrote “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” The prayer does not appear anywhere in his surviving writings, and it is not included among the Franciscan Order’s official prayers of St. Francis. Francis died in 1226, and the prayer has not been traced in print any earlier than 1912.
Where did the Prayer of St. Francis actually come from?
The Prayer of St. Francis first appeared in December 1912 in La Clochette, a monthly bulletin published in Paris by a small Catholic society called the Ligue de la Sainte-Messe. It was printed anonymously, in French, under the title “Belle prière à faire pendant la Messe” — a beautiful prayer to say during Mass. The French historian Christian Renoux, who published a full study of it in 2001, found that most of the bulletin’s contents were written by its founding editor, Father Esther Bouquerel, so Bouquerel may be the author. It has never been proved.
When was the peace prayer first attributed to St. Francis?
The first known printing that carries Francis’s name is from 22 January 1927, in the American Quaker magazine Friends’ Intelligencer, headed “A prayer of St. Francis of Assissi.” The link was probably formed around 1920, when a French Franciscan, Father Étienne Benoît, had the prayer printed on the back of a mass-produced holy card bearing a picture of St. Francis — without ever claiming he wrote it.
Is “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” the same as the Prayer of St. Francis?
Yes, “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” is the sung version of the same prayer. It was adapted and set to music in 1967 by Sebastian Temple, a South African songwriter who had joined the Franciscan Third Order. Many people who have sung it in church all their lives have never seen the prayer in its spoken form, which begins “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace” in older English wordings.
What did St. Francis of Assisi actually write?
Francis’s authentic writings include the Canticle of the Creatures, a song of praise credited as one of the first great poems in the Italian language, along with his Rule and several letters. Franciscan accounts say that after finishing the Canticle he added four lines blessing those who forgive, in order to settle a quarrel between the mayor of Assisi and the town’s bishop, and sent a friar to sing them in front of both men. The two were reconciled.
