Traditional prayer
Sub Tuum Praesidium (We Fly to Thy Patronage)
We fly to thy patronage, O Holy Mother of God; despise not thou our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin.
Latin
Sub tuum praesidium confugimus, Sancta Dei Genitrix; nostras deprecationes ne despicias in necessitatibus nostris, et a periculis cunctis libera nos semper, Virgo gloriosa et benedicta.
Latin The Raccolta (1910), no. 184, pp. 154–155, the Latin printed beside the English (æ written as ae)
About this prayer
Sub tuum praesidium means “under thy protection.” It is one sentence long and made for danger: we fly to thee, do not despise our petitions, deliver us from every peril. It calls Mary by her greatest title, Mother of God, because that is the reason she can help. She is the Mother of the One who saves.
It is very old, but how old is honestly disputed. A Greek text of the prayer survives on a papyrus in the John Rylands Library in Manchester (P.Ryl. III 470), published by C. H. Roberts in 1938. Roberts dated it to the fourth century with a question mark; the papyrologist Edgar Lobel was unwilling to place it later than the third; later scholars have argued for dates centuries later. You will often read that it is the oldest prayer to Our Lady. It may be. What is certain is that the Church has prayed it for a very long time, and still does.
In 2018 Pope Francis asked the faithful to pray the Rosary every day through October and to close it with this “ancient invocation” and with the prayer to St. Michael written by Leo XIII (Holy See Press Office, communiqué of 29 September 2018).
The 1910 Raccolta prints it as an evening prayer, the companion of the Salve Regina, with the Latin beside the English. A Catholic who has said it every night for years knows it the way she knows her own front door.
When to pray it
- In danger, sudden or slow.
- At night, when the house is dark and everyone is home, or isn’t.
- At the end of the Rosary.
- Before travel, surgery, an exam, a hard conversation.
- With small children: it is short enough to learn in a week.
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.