Traditional prayer
Come, Holy Spirit (Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple)
Come, O Holy Ghost, fill the hearts of Thy faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love.
V. Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created.
R. And Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.
Let us pray.
O God, Who hast taught the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant that by the gift of the same Spirit we may be always truly wise, and ever rejoice in His consolations, through Christ our Lord.
R. Amen.
Latin
Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium, et tui amoris in eis ignem accende.
V. Emitte Spiritum tuum et creabuntur.
R. Et renovabis faciem terræ.
Oremus.
Deus, qui corda fidelium sancti Spiritus illustratione docuisti, da nobis in eodem Spiritu recta sapere, et de ejus semper consolatione gaudere. Per Christum Dominum nostrum.
R. Amen.
Latin Lasance, My Prayer-Book (1908), pp. 225–226
About this prayer
This is the Church’s short prayer to the Holy Spirit: an invocation, a versicle and response, and a closing prayer, printed here in Latin and English as Father Lasance gave them in 1908. “Holy Ghost” and “Holy Spirit” name the same divine Person, the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity; older English uses both, as this text does within a single prayer. It is not the Pentecost Sequence, the “Golden Sequence,” which opens with the same three Latin words, “Veni, Sancte Spiritus, Et emitte coelitus” (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1912); Father Lasance prints that hymn separately (p. 487).
The opening invocation is a prayer in its own right. The Raccolta of 1910 lists it as no. 41 (“Come, O Holy Ghost, fill the hearts of thy faithful, and kindle in them the fire of thy love”), with an indulgence granted by Pius X in 1907. The versicle comes from the psalm: “Thou shalt send forth thy spirit, and they shall be created: and thou shalt renew the face of the earth” (Psalm 103:30, Douay-Rheims; Psalm 104:30 in modern Bibles). The closing prayer asks for two gifts: to be truly wise, and to rejoice in the Spirit’s consolation.
The Catechism teaches that it is the Holy Spirit who draws us into prayer at all, and that the Church therefore invites us to call on Him every day, above all at the beginning and end of anything important. Beside the form it calls the traditional petition, asking the Father through Christ to give us the Consoler, it names this plainest and most direct cry as traditional too, one that every liturgical tradition has woven into its antiphons and hymns (CCC 2670–2671).
It is the prayer of Pentecost, when the disciples were gathered in one place and “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:4, Douay-Rheims). Every household that prays it asks for the same fire.
When to pray it
- Before prayer, Scripture or spiritual reading. Lasance sets it beside his prayer before meditation, study or spiritual reading.
- Before a decision, a difficult letter, a hard conversation, an examination, a shift at work.
- With children before homework, and with a husband before a decision you must make together.
- Each day of the novena before Pentecost, which the Raccolta of 1910 listed among the devotions indulgenced in its day (no. 37).
Any indulgences named on this page are those recorded in the older prayer books it cites. Pope Paul VI reformed the Church's indulgences in 1967 (Indulgentiarum Doctrina); the current rules are in the Church's Enchiridion of Indulgences.