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1765 Regina Begin the Thirty Days

The Cradle · Motherhood

Carry your child in prayer.

A spiritual companion from the first weeks of waiting through the long nights after: Scripture, prayer and a saint for every week, and the Church's old blessings of mothers.

What the Cradle is

A spiritual companion, not medical advice. The Cradle does not tell you how your baby is growing or what to do about your health; your doctor or midwife does that. It keeps you company in prayer. Choose where you are, and it opens the right things:

Each day you pray for your child you can mark it, and the Cradle keeps an honest count: consecutive days, and one missed day starts the count again. If you prayed yesterday but forgot to mark it, you can log yesterday. What you mark stays in this browser on your device.

The blessing of mothers

The old Roman Ritual has a blessing a priest gives to a woman with child "in periculis partus", in the dangers of childbirth. It asks God, who filled John the Baptist with the Holy Spirit and made him leap in his mother's womb, to keep the child safe, to bring the child happily into the light and to Baptism, and it ends by calling God's blessing down on the mother and her child. The Cradle prints its prayers in Latin from a public-domain edition of the Ritual (1927), shortened (the psalm and some short versicles and responses are left out, and it says so), with an English gloss of our own, and makes a card you can print.

For centuries a Christian mother also came to church after the birth to give thanks and receive a blessing, a custom called churching. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 describes it as a pious and praiseworthy custom rather than a precept, and notes that the blessing was given in its ordinary form even when the child had been stillborn or had died without Baptism. Today's Book of Blessings has a blessing of parents before childbirth, which may be given at any time during the pregnancy, and a blessing of a mother after childbirth for a mother who could not take part in her child's Baptism. Ask your parish priest.

Preparing for Baptism

Church law obliges parents to see that their baby is baptized within the first few weeks of life, and asks them to go to their pastor soon after the birth, or even before it, to ask for Baptism and to be prepared for it (canon 867). A child is given one godparent, or a godmother and a godfather (canon 873). A godparent must be at least sixteen unless the bishop sets another age or the pastor makes an exception for a just cause, a confirmed Catholic who has received the Eucharist and lives a life of faith, under no canonical penalty, and not the child's own parent; a baptized member of a non-Catholic ecclesial community may stand only as a witness, alongside a Catholic godparent (canon 874), though an Eastern Orthodox Christian may, for a just cause, be a godparent with a Catholic godparent (Ecumenical Directory, 1993, no. 98). Parents, godparents and the pastor see that the child is not given a name foreign to Christian sensibility (canon 855). In an emergency, when no priest or deacon can come, any person with the right intention may baptize, pouring water on the baby's head while saying the words of Baptism; the Cradle prints those words, from the Baltimore Catechism (canon 861; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1256). The Cradle turns these into a checklist you can tick and print, and shows the saints the Church keeps on your due date or your baby's birthday, to help you choose a patron.

If the waiting ends in sorrow

If you lose your baby, before or after the birth, the Cradle can put these pages away (it asks you once to be sure), so it does not keep counting weeks or days at you; the days you prayed are kept. If your baby is among your children in your Regina profile, the Cradle can also keep your baby there as a child who has died, so no tool counts an age or anniversaries as for a living child. It offers a gentle page with words for this grief, the Church's blessing for parents after a miscarriage, and people to call, and it hands you to Mater Dolorosa, Regina's companion in sorrow. You may also find For the Grieving Mother in the Library a help. If the days after a birth become frightening or dark, the Cradle shows the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, each checked on its official site. In an emergency, call 911.

Where the words come from

More for mothers: Prayers for Mothers · All Regina tools