Prayer of Saint Francis

Mistaken attribution (c.1927) to 13th-century Saint Francis

Around 1918, Franciscan Father Étienne Benoît reprinted the "Prayer for Peace" in French, without attribution, on the back of a mass-produced holy card depicting his Order's founder, the inspirational peacemaker from the Crusades era, Saint Francis of Assisi. The prayer was circulating in the United States by January 1927, when its first known English version (slightly abridged from the 1912 French original) appeared in the Quaker magazine Friends' Intelligencer, under the misattributed and misspelled title "A prayer of St. Francis of Assissi". The saint's namesake American archbishop and military vicar Francis Spellman distributed millions of copies of the "Prayer of St. Francis" during World War II, and the next year it was read into the Congressional Record by Senator Albert W. Hawkes. As a friar later summarized the relationship between the prayer and St. Francis: "One can safely say that although he is not the author, it resembles him and would not have displeased him.

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