Rights dossier — devotional prayers, and the Litany of Humility

Researched: 2026-09-22, founder question ("can I publish the Litany of Humility and the Litany of Patience?"). Establishes a new source class: private devotions. Nothing in SOURCE-REGISTRY.md covered prayers before this.

Verdicts:

| | | |---|---| | Litany of Humility (the familiar "Deliver me, Jesus" form) | CLEAR. Read in an 1880 US printing; cited in French from 1865. | | Litany of Humility (Franchi's, a different prayer of the same name) | CLEAR. Verified in an 1889 US printing. | | Litany of Patience | DO NOT PUBLISH. The circulating text is a 21st-century work by a living author. |

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1. The Litany of Humility — clear, and far older than its attribution

Source: Little Manual of Novices, by the Author of Golden Sands, "translated from the French of the fifth edition, and revised by a member of the Society of Jesus." New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 31 Barclay Street; Montreal: 275 Notre Dame Street, 1880. Litany at pages 132-134. Internet Archive littlemanualofno00sylv.

PD basis in one sentence: US publication, 1880 — public domain by date, with no renewal question to reach.

Verified by reading the scan, not by trusting a citation. The full three-movement structure is present and materially identical to the text in use today:

LITANY OF HUMILITY. O Jesus meek and humble of heart! Jesus, hear me. From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus… From the fear of being humbled, Deliver me, Jesus… That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to wish.

Modern printings differ only in trivia — "grant me the grace to wish" has become "to desire it"; a couple of invocations are reworded. Use the 1880 wording. It is the one whose provenance we can state, and the difference between them is not worth inheriting an unknown.

The trail runs back to 1865 — the year Merry del Val was born

A second pass, searching the original language rather than English, pushed it further. These are cited, not read: Google Books, HathiTrust and Gallica all refused automated access, and the chain comes from the citation apparatus of the Spanish Wikipedia article, whose editors had already done the archival work. Each identifier resolves to a real book; none of the pages could be opened from here.

| | | | |---|---|---| | 1865 | Catéchisme de l'humilité, Nîmes: Imp. A. Baldy, pp. 124-125 | cited (Google Books kAOoaU0Ve2sC) | | 1866 | Manuel du pèlerin de Notre-Dame de Prime-Combe, Montpellier: Pierre Grollier, pp. 304-305 | cited (Gallica bpt6k5484699m) | | 1873 | Adrien Sylvain, Le Petit livre des Novices, Avignon: Aubanel Frères, pp. 78-79 | cited — almost certainly the French original of our 1880 English | | 1880 | Little Manual of Novices, New York: Sadlier, pp. 132-134 | read, in full |

1865 is the year Rafael Merry del Val was born, and the printing is French, from Nîmes. A newborn in London did not write it. This does not change the verdict, which rests on the 1880 printing we actually read; it makes the conclusion below unarguable rather than merely likely.

The attribution is traditional, not documentary — and that helps us

Every modern source credits Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val (1865-1930). The 1880 printing makes that impossible as authorship: he was fifteen, not ordained until 1888, and the book was already translating a French fifth edition. The underlying prayer is French and older still.

This matters for rights, not just for trivia. Had we relied on the attribution, the basis would have been "author died 1930, so life-plus-seventy expired in 2000" — which is true in life-plus-term countries but leaves the US turning on first-publication date and renewal. The 1880 printing removes all of that. The weaker claim about the prayer's origin produced the stronger claim about its rights.

And the misattribution has happened twice. Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi's Breviario Laico (2010) credits the same litany to Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), who was seven in 1865. Two eminent names, two impossibilities, one prayer — which is the tell.

Compare the Prayer of Saint Francis, the standard cautionary case: absent from Francis's writings, first printed anonymously in French in 1912, attached to his name around 1918. A famous name attached to a prayer is a clue about reputation, never about date.

2. A second, different Litany of Humility — also clear

Source: Hand-book of Humility, or, The Love of Self-Contempt, from the Italian of Father Joseph Ignatius Franchi, Superior of the Oratory, Florence. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co.; London: Burns & Oates, 1889. Litany at page 338. Internet Archive HandBookOfHumility.

Bibliography, now established: Giuseppe Ignazio Franchi, Oratorian of Florence, born 1712, died 9 April 1778. His treatise Dell'amore al proprio disprezzo was first printed anonymously, at his own insistence, out of humility — so the first edition necessarily follows his death. Cited first edition: Firenze, Albizziniana all'insegna del sole, 1785, reaching a third edition by c. 1803, which is what the 1889 English translates. A clean two-century chain, every link pre-1930, with no competing modern claim attached to it anywhere.

A completely different prayer sharing the title. Franchi's is a set of scriptural invocations on Christ's humility:

O Jesus, humble of Heart, hear my prayer! … Jesus, truly a hidden God, Jesus, laid in a manger, Jesus, offered to the Lord and redeemed with two doves, Jesus, borne into Egypt…

The trap, recorded so nobody falls into it twice. Searching for the title "Litany of Humility" in pre-1930 scans returns this book — and if the search had stopped there, we would have cited an 1889 source for a prayer it does not contain. Franchi was born in 1712; the English is from the Italian third edition of c. 1803. Search on the words of the prayer, never on its name.

3. The Litany of Patience — do not publish

The text circulating under this name in Catholic use today is a contemporary work by a named, living author: Christina Dehan Jaloway, who describes composing it on her own blog, modelled deliberately on the Litany of Humility. It is under ordinary copyright. Reproducing it needs her permission.

A second pass in Italian, Spanish and French found no pre-1930 printing in any language, and turned up a fourth text rather than an older one: "Litanies de la patience de Saint Antoine de Padoue", French, labelled an extract from rather than a work by Anthony of Padua, carrying no date, no source and no manuscript reference.

Three other things carry the name and none rescues it. A short unattributed rhymed prayer on Catholic Online has no traceable date or author — unknown, not old. And an Anglican litany attributed to J. M. Neale (1818-1866) appears only in modern web reproductions with no cited printing, and is not what circulates in Catholic use.

No pre-1931 printing of any "Litany of Patience" was found. That is a negative from a limited search rather than proof of absence — HathiTrust refused us and Archive's public API indexes metadata rather than full text, and a litany usually sits buried inside a larger prayer book where a title search will never see it. If the founder has a specific text in hand, its opening lines would make the search precise. Until then it is not publishable.

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4. The rules this establishes for any future prayer

1. Ask which printed edition, not whether the prayer is old. Devotions circulate for centuries in manuscript and speech; what we publish is a particular English text with its own term. The question is always: which dated printing are these exact words from?
2. Search the words, never the title. §2 is the proof. Titles are reused; texts are not.
3. Search the original language. Our first pass looked only for modern English phrasing and found nothing before 1930 — the prayer was French, and an English-only search could not have seen it however far back it went.
4. An imprimatur is not a rights grant. It is a declaration that a book contains no doctrinal error, and says nothing about who owns the text. The Franchi volume shows the two instruments side by side and four years apart: imprimatur 17 January 1885, copyright 1889.
5. Do not assume devotional material lapsed. Our own CPDV dossier records St. Anthony Guild Press renewing six 1941 devotional titles in 1969, ten 1940 titles in 1968 and six 1942 titles in 1970. Catholic devotional publishers renewed diligently. A prayer first printed in a 1940s pamphlet is a live copyright question, not a formality.
6. The cutoff moves every January. It is now pre-1931 for US publication, not pre-1929 — the 1 January 2026 rollover released 1930. Re-derive it from the current year rather than quoting a remembered figure.
7. A famous attribution is not a date. §1 and the Prayer of Saint Francis both show the attribution failing while the prayer turns out older, not younger. Test it; do not lean on it.

4b. What must be said when this is published

Founder, 2026-09-22: the misattribution gets mentioned. It is not a footnote — for most readers it will be the most interesting thing on the page, and saying it is the difference between hosting a prayer and having something to say about it.

The claim the page may make, and must not exceed:

• The prayer is in print in French, in 1865, and again in 1866 and 1873, before any English printing. Our text is the English of 1880.
• It is not Cardinal Merry del Val's. He was born in 1865, the year of the earliest known printing, in a language and country not his own. He prayed it daily and his name became attached to it; that is a fact about transmission, not authorship.
• It is not Charles de Foucauld's either, though a cardinal's 2010 anthology says so. He was seven.
• We do not know who wrote it. Say that plainly. An honest "unknown" is worth more than a confident guess, and this page's whole value is that it checked.

What the page must not do: state the 1865 attribution chain as though we had read those pages. We have not — Google Books, HathiTrust and Gallica all refused us. The 1880 printing is the one we opened. Wording that survives that distinction: "in print in French by 1865" is supportable; "first written in 1865" is not.

A best guess at the author is still open. The lead is whoever wrote or compiled the 1865 Catéchisme de l'humilité (Nîmes, Imp. A. Baldy) — anonymous so far. The 1865-66 printings cluster around Nîmes, Montpellier and the Prime-Combe Marian shrine in the Gard, which suggests a southern French diocesan or religious milieu rather than a famous name. Until that is run down, the page says unknown.

5. Where a published prayer would live

No DEVOTION category exists on Work. The nearest is LITURGY, whose nine members — Roman Missal, Roman Ritual, Liturgy of the Hours, the Byzantine and Syriac liturgies and the rest — are every one of them CITATION_ONLY. The archive has never hosted a liturgical or devotional text, and the reason is the same one recorded for the 1962 Missal: the Latin was never the obstacle, the English translation was.

A litany is not subject to the objection that stopped the Roman Catechism, though. That work stayed CITATION_ONLY because publishing two of forty chapters "would tell a reader that this is the work." A litany is complete in itself, so publishing one claims nothing it cannot support. If the founder wants it, this is a clean first hosted devotion — and it wants either a new DEVOTION category or an explicit decision to file it under LITURGY.

6. One correction to the record

An earlier draft of this research cited The Fervent Adorer (Dublin, 1867) as carrying a shorter humility litany, and re-asserted it when challenged. I recorded that it "did not survive verification". That was too absolute, and this is the correction.

The volume's own contents list a "Litany for Humility" at p.217. It is there, and the research was not inventing it.

What the grep actually established is narrower and still stands: it is not our prayer. The full OCR returns zero occurrences of "desire of being esteemed" and zero of "Deliver me", which no litany of the Merry del Val family could lack. So a humility litany sits at p.217 and is a different text.

The correct claim was "the title is there, the wording is not." Recording the overstatement because the same volume later turned out to hold a genuine witness for a different prayer — its Litany of Divine Providence at p.375 — and a reader who took my dismissal at face value would have skipped the book.

The 1880 Sadlier printing remains the earliest appearance anyone here has actually read. The 1865-1873 French chain above is better evidence of age and worse evidence of text, because none of it could be opened. Both statements belong in the record, and they should not be blended.

If someone wants the 1865 page confirmed firsthand, it needs a human in the Google Books viewer or a HathiTrust login. It is the one loose end, and the verdict does not depend on it.

This is not legal advice. It is a dated, checkable provenance record of the kind every other work in this archive carries, and it should be read the same way.