The Catholic Novena App

The Catholic Novena App is a simple prayer app built around novenas — those nine-day prayers Catholics have leaned on for centuries. You open it, pick a novena, and pray.

Inside you get a good stack of the traditional ones: the Divine Mercy novena, the Sacred Heart, novenas to Our Lady, to St. Joseph, to the Holy Spirit, and plenty of the saints. Each one is laid out day by day so you know exactly what to pray and where you are in the nine days. You can also build your own novena if there is an intention you want to carry for nine days that is not already in the list.

What I like is that it keeps things plain. There is no account to set up, no flood of notifications unless you turn them on, and the prayers are the actual traditional texts rather than someone's paraphrase. When you commit to a novena you usually need a small nudge to remember day six and day seven, and the reminders handle that without nagging.

It is a good fit if you are someone who starts novenas with good intentions and then loses track around the middle. It works well for a particular intention — a sick relative, a job, a decision — where you want to pray steadily for nine days. It is also fine for families who want to pray a novena together in the evening.

It is not a full prayer book or a daily devotional, and it will not teach you much about why we pray novenas or where each one came from. The design is functional rather than beautiful. If you want history and catechesis along with the prayers, you will want something more.

It is free, made by Reeba Sebastian, and it carries a high rating from the people using it. You can find it on the App Store: The Catholic Novena App. For keeping a novena on track, it does the one job well.