Do novenas really work?

[blaiselfd5]

I am in the process of looking for the perfect home to raise my children. It is a huge deal to me because I want what is best for them. I thought I found what to me was the perfect home, within my budget, and was persuaded to pray a novena to St. Joseph in hopes of getting the house. I prayed the novena but was informed not long after that the home was given to another family. Am I wrong for praying a novena and asking for a material possession? Could my novena not have worked because I prayed the novena wrong? Or should I just accept that I didn’t get the home because it wasn’t the right one?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

It sounds to me that you may have a misunderstanding about the nature and purpose of novenas. Novenas are not intended to be a magical incantation that one must say “exactly right,” and for which you are granted your wish. Such a view of a novena is superstitious and the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition (CCC 2111).

Novenas are nine days of prayer for a particular intention, or in honor of a special saint or important occasion. They are said in a spirit of trust in God that he always hears our prayers and will grant our desires if what we desire is his will. In this, we imitate Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane when he prayed: “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42).