Morning Offering

The Morning Offering is the prayer by which a Christian gives the whole of the coming day to God at its very first moment. Before the tasks and trials of the hours begin, the soul lays them all — "prayers, works, joys, and sufferings" — upon the altar, so that nothing of the day is wasted and everything, even the smallest labor, becomes an act of love. It is one of the simplest and most fruitful of all Catholic devotions, and the Church has long recommended it as the first prayer after rising.

The familiar formula comes from the Apostleship of Prayer, a devotion founded in 1844 by the French Jesuit Father François-Xavier Gautrelet to unite ordinary Christians to the redemptive work of Christ. Its idea is beautifully simple: that any Catholic, in any state of life, can be an "apostle" by offering each day's actions, in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, for the intentions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus — the salvation of souls, reparation for sin, and the good of the whole Church.

The offering is made through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the Church loves to entrust her gifts to Our Lady, who presents them purified to her Son. And it is joined to "the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world" — so that the poorest offering of a single soul is caught up into the countless Masses being offered at every hour across the earth, and given infinite worth by the one Sacrifice of Christ.

Many conclude the offering by adding the Holy Father's monthly intention, published for what is now the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network. The whole devotion rests on an ancient Christian instinct — to seek God at daybreak, as the Psalmist sang, "In the morning I will stand before thee" (Psalm 5:5), trusting that His mercies "are new every morning" (Lamentations 3:23).

Two verses stand behind the practice. The first is the psalmist’s resolution, which is what an offering made at waking amounts to: “In the morning I will stand before thee, and will see” (Ps. 5:5). The second is the reason it can be made again after every failure of the day before: “The mercies of the Lord that we are not consumed: because his commiserations have not failed. They are new every morning” (Lam. 3:22–23).