Pope Leo’s Prayer Intention for November 2025: For the prevention of suicide – Let us pray that those who are struggling with suicidal thoughts might find the support, care and love they need in their community, and be open to the beauty of life.
Pope Leo’s prayer for people contemplating suicide moves quickly to other people. They and the communities they form will provide the support and love that help us cling to life. Their faces are the mirror in which despairing people may appreciate the beauty of life.
People who are contemplating suicide need friends and family members with whom they can speak about their life and their impulse to end it. Yet that conversation is often the most difficult thing for them to find. Suicide has a stigma associated with it.
One of the factors that contributes both to the severity of mental illness and to suicide is the stigma that often attaches to them. Stigma makes people blame themselves for their condition, can make it difficult for them to speak about it. It can also make it hard for others to listen to them or enter into conversation with them. They and the people who care for them are wrapped in a silence in which fear, resentment and despair can breed.
Stigma, too, reaches beyond the life of people who take their own lives. It makes their family and friends uncomfortable speaking about them. Others can feel uncomfortable in their presence, with the result that they have to deal alone with their grief, bewilderment and feelings of anger. They are then at a higher risk of mental illness and of taking their own lives.
For that reason, support for the relatives and friends of people who have taken their lives is an important factor in preventing suicide. Suicide is not just the individual and isolated event that stigma threatens to make it. As Pope Leo suggests, it is a social event whose effects reach out through a large network of relationships. That network can be a source of exclusion and of risk, or a source of healing and inclusion. The work of Jesuit Social Services sponsored Support after Suicide in counselling relatives and friends of people who have suicided and in providing a safe forum for them to meet and to talk together has recognised and met this need.
In response to the suicide of many of their former colleagues, many sportspersons have spoken openly of the challenges to their mental health on the restrictions caused by the frequent concussion, and by the challenges of their sport. They would once have been expected to tough it out silently, but now share their experience of mental health difficulties, have withdrawn from sport to nurture themselves, and supported one another in the face of criticism. Although a stigma still hangs over suicide and mental illness and needs constantly to be recognised and overcome, society has shown greater acceptance of what was once seen as weakness, and greater appreciation of the need and benefit of speaking about it.
Pope Leo’s prayer recognises the growing movement to recognise people’s mental illness and desperation, to stay with them, and to refuse to allow taboos to isolate them. It is also a time to stand by people who have lost friends and relatives during the pandemic, and especially those whose relatives have suicided. In a time of so much exclusion, it is important to include those who suffer from mental illness and to reach out to those who grieve for people who have taken their own lives.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ writes for Jesuit Communications and Jesuit Social Services.
