‘[...] Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand’ (Matthew 12:25; KJV)

I believe that prayers in Latin are more powerful than in the vernacular (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French or even English). This not only because Latin is a sacred language, but also because of the rhythms, sounds and vibrations of that tongue. This is probably the reason why the current wearer of the papal tiara, the anti-Pope Francis, has forbidden the Catholic clergy to perform the mass in Latin...

Now shame on me because the following translation of a beautiful prayer wrongly
attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi has remained with me as an unpublished computer file since 29th September of this year – the date when I translated the prayer from French into Latin – even though on that day I put everything on hold until I had translated ‘Belle prière à faire pendant la messe’ (‘A beautiful prayer to recite during the Mass’) – the first known title for the prayer (1912)  – because of the sense of urgency I felt at the time.

As I was reminded no later than yesterday that the dark forces we wrestle against (Ephesians 6:10-18) are particularly strong these days (is it because of Biden’s and his European acolytes’ impending ‘dark winter’?), I felt that it was high time to open my HTML editor, copy and paste my translation and then upload Oratio pacis on to the server space I rent out here in Switzerland.

[Please note that I am really not an expert in Latin; moreover, the translation is in what
I would describe as ecclesiastical Latin, not classical Latin; finally, my translation is based on the French original, not on any of the English translations which have surfaced since the early 1930s – the prayer was even read out at the funeral of one of America’s first ladies, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.]

According to Christian Renoux, the first recorded instance (in French) of the so-called peace prayer of Saint Francis was published in the December 1912 issue of La Clochette (the small bell). For a discussion of the prayer’s genealogy (plus the text in French), please read Mr Renoux’s article entitled ‘The Origin of the Peace Prayer of St Francis’, available at https://franciscan-archive.org/franciscana/peace.html. An early translation into English, going back to the 1930s, can be found here, at https://archive.org/details/livingcourageous0000page/page/276/mode/2up?q=instrument.