“Jesus, I surrender myself to You, take care of everything!” That one line, repeated ten times a day for nine days, is the heart of the Surrender Novena — a modern prayer of total trust that has spread quietly through parishes, prayer groups, and Catholic apostolates over the past several decades. It comes from the writings of a Neapolitan priest most Catholics have never heard of: Servant of God Fr. Dolindo Ruotolo.
Who Was Fr. Dolindo Ruotolo?
Dolindo Ruotolo (1882–1970) was a diocesan priest of Naples, Italy, ordained in 1905. He lived much of his life in poverty, cared for the sick without fear of contagion, and offered his own many sufferings — he spent his final decade almost completely paralyzed — as a “victim soul” united to Christ’s own suffering.
He was also, for a time, a controversial figure within the Church. In the 1920s and 1930s his multi-volume biblical commentary, written under the pen name “Dain Cohenel,” drew criticism from the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and he spent nearly seventeen years under a form of ecclesiastical suspension before Pope Pius XI ordered a fresh review of his case and he was fully reinstated in 1937. The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Alessio Ascalesi, thought highly enough of him afterward to choose him as his own confessor.
Fr. Dolindo was a contemporary and friend of St. Padre Pio, who is said to have called him a saint and remarked that “the whole of Paradise” was in his soul. Fr. Dolindo died in Naples in 1970. His cause for canonization has since been opened, and he carries the title “Servant of God” — the Church has not yet declared him Blessed or a Saint, and the Surrender Novena itself has never received a formal Vatican approval or indulgence the way some older prayers have. It is, rather, a popular devotion: one Pope Francis himself pointed to approvingly in a 2021 letter on the spirituality of trust and abandonment to God’s providence, and one widely promoted today by EWTN, the National Catholic Register, and many Catholic parishes and prayer apps.
What Is the Surrender Novena?
The Surrender Novena is drawn from Fr. Dolindo’s own spiritual writings on abandonment to Divine Providence, later compiled into nine daily meditations written in the voice of Jesus speaking directly to the soul. Its Italian refrain, “Gesù, pensaci Tu” — “Jesus, You take care of it” — became the signature of what Fr. Dolindo called simply “the spirituality of surrender”: the practice of handing a difficulty completely to God, without continuing to turn it over anxiously in one’s own mind.
It isn’t a devotion tied to a particular feast, medal, or approved apparition. It’s closer in spirit to the Church’s much older tradition of abandonment to Providence — the same current found in St. Vincent de Paul, and on this site in the Prayer of Abandonment written a generation earlier by Blessed Charles de Foucauld. Fr. Dolindo’s novena takes that same surrender and turns it into a concrete, nine-day exercise.
How to Pray the Surrender Novena
Each of the nine days follows the same simple pattern, and takes only a few minutes:
Begin with the Sign of the Cross. Read that day’s short meditation slowly, as though Jesus were speaking the words directly to you. Then repeat the refrain, “O Jesus, I surrender myself to You, take care of everything!” ten times, pausing after each repetition rather than rushing through it. Close with a short prayer entrusting yourself to Mary, and a final Sign of the Cross.
Some people pray all nine days in sequence for a specific intention — a difficult diagnosis, a troubled relationship, a financial worry, a decision they can’t see the way through. Others return to a single day’s meditation whenever that particular struggle (worry, impatience, fear of the future) comes up again.
The Nine Days of Surrender
The daily meditations build on one another, though each stands on its own:
Day 1 begins with the core promise: every act of true, complete surrender to God produces peace, because it stops relying on the soul’s own limited strength and puts the difficulty entirely into God’s hands.
Day 2 distinguishes surrender from mere resignation. It isn’t giving up; it’s closing the eyes of the soul the way a child, having asked its mother for help, stops anxiously supervising how she does it.
Day 3 returns to the most familiar line in Christian prayer, “Thy will be done,” and asks that it be prayed not as a resigned sigh but as an act of confidence that God will actually act.
Day 4 speaks directly to a fear that has no obvious answer — when the trouble seems only to be getting worse — and asks the soul to keep trusting anyway, the way a patient trusts a doctor even through a painful treatment.
Day 5 uses the image of a sleeping child being carried across a dangerous river: the child isn’t asked to find the way, only to rest.
Day 6 is a caution against the restlessness that pulls a soul back toward purely human solutions, urging it instead to stay at rest in God’s protection.
Day 7 makes the boldest claim of the novena — that God works in proportion to how completely a soul surrenders, not in proportion to how cleverly it has reasoned its way to an answer.
Day 8 asks the soul to stop rehearsing both the present trouble and the future it fears, and to rest instead in God’s goodness alone.
Day 9 closes with the novena’s best-known line: that a single act of real surrender accomplishes more than a thousand anxious prayers.
Is the Surrender Novena Approved by the Catholic Church?
It’s a fair question, and worth answering honestly rather than glossing over. The Surrender Novena is not a liturgical prayer, it carries no indulgence, and Fr. Dolindo himself is not (yet) canonized — he remains a Servant of God, the earliest stage of the Church’s canonization process. Nothing in the novena’s content conflicts with Catholic teaching; its message is simply an intensified form of trust in Divine Providence that the Church has always encouraged. That combination — doctrinally sound, widely and openly promoted by mainstream Catholic outlets like EWTN and the National Catholic Register, but not itself a formally approved devotion — is the most accurate way to describe where it stands today.
A Closing Prayer of Surrender
If you take up this novena, let its final line be the one you carry with you afterward: “O Jesus, I surrender myself to You, take care of everything.” Pray it the next time worry starts to take over — not as a way of doing nothing, but as a way of finally letting God do what only He can.