Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among
women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
The Catholic Encyclopedia
Robert Appleton Company
Hail Mary
The Hail Mary (sometimes called the "Angelical salutation", sometimes, from the first words in its Latin form, the "Ave Maria") is the most familiar of all the prayers used by the Universal Church in
honor of our Blessed Lady.
It is commonly described as consisting of three parts. The first, "Hail (Mary) full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women", embodies the words used by the Angel Gabriel in saluting the Blessed Virgin (Luke, I, 28). The second, "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb (Jesus)", is borrowed from the Divinely inspired greeting of St. Elizabeth (Luke, i, 42), which attaches itself the more naturally to the first part, because the words "benedicta tu in mulieribus" (I, 28) or "inter mulieres" (I, 42) are common to both salutations. Finally, the petition "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." is stated by the official "Catechism of the Council of Trent" to have been framed by the Church itself. "Most rightly", says the Catechism, "has the Holy Church of God added to this thanksgiving, petition also and the invocation of the most holy Mother of God, thereby implying that we should piously and suppliantly have recourse to her in order that by her intercession she may reconcile God with us sinners and
obtain for us the blessing we need both for this present life and for the life which has no end."
ORIGIN
It was antecedently probable that the striking words of the Angel's salutation would be adopted by the faithful as soon as personal devotion to the Mother of God manifested itself in the Church. The Vulgate rendering, Ave gratia plena, "Hail full of grace", has often been criticized as too explicit a translation of the Greek chaire kecharitomene, but the words
are in any case most striking, and the Anglican words are in any case most striking, and the Anglican Revised Version now supplements the "Hail,
thou that art highly favored" of the original Authorized Version by the marginal alternative, "Hail thou, endued with grace". We are not surprised, then, to find these or analogous words employed in a Syriac ritual attributed to Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (c. 513), or by Andrew of Crete and St. John Damascene, or again the "Liber Antiphonarious" of St. Gregory the Great as the offertory of the Mass for the fourth Sunday of Advent. But such examples hardly warrant the conclusion that the Hail Mary was at that early period used in the Church as a separate formula of Catholic devotion. Similarly a story attributing the introduction of the Hail Mary to St. Ildephonsus of Toledo must probably be regarded as apocryphal. The legend narrates how St. Ildephonsus going to the church by night found our Blessed Lady seated in the apse in his own episcopal hair with a choir of virgins around her who were singing her praises. Then St. Ildephonsus approached "making a series of genuflections and repeating at each of them those words of the angel's greeting: `Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb'". Our Lady then showed her pleasure at this homage and rewarded the saint with the gift of a beautiful chasuble (Mabillon, Acta SS. O.S.B., saec V, pref., no. 119). The story, however, in this explicit form cannot be traced further back than Hermann of Laon at the beginning of the twelfth century.
In point of fact there is little or no trace of the Hail Mary as an accepted devotional formula before about from certain
vesicles and responsorial occurring in the Little Office or Cursus of the Blessed Virgin which just at that time was coming into
favor among the monastic orders. Two Anglo-Saxon manuscripts at the British Museum, one of which may be as old as the year 1030, show that the words "Ave Maria" etc. and "benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui" occurred in almost every part of the Cursus, and though we cannot be sure that these clauses were at first joined together so as to make one prayer, there is conclusive evidence that this had come to pass only a very little later. (See "The Month", Nov., 1901, pp. 486-8.) The great collections of Mary-legends which began to be formed in the early years of the twelfth century (see Mussafia, "Marien-legenden") show us that this salutation of our Lady was fast becoming widely prevalent as a form of private devotion, though it is not quite certain how far it was customary to include the clause "and
blessed is the fruit of thy womb". But Abbot Baldwin, a Cistercian who was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1184, wrote before this date a sort of paraphrase of the Ave Maria in which he says:
To this salutation of the Angel, by which we daily greet the most Blessed Virgin, with such devotion as we may, we are accustomed to add the words, "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb," by which clause Elizabeth at a later time, on hearing the Virgin's salutation to her, caught up and completed, as it were, the Angel's words, saying: "Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb."
Not long after this (c. 1196) we meet a synodal decree of Eudes de Sully, Bishop of Paris, enjoining upon the clergy the see that the "Salutation of the Blessed Virgin" was familiarly known to their flocks as well as the Creed and the Lord's Prayer; and after this date similar enactments become frequent in every part of the world, beginning in England with the Synod of Durham in 1217.
THE HAIL MARY A SALUTATION
To understand the early developments of this devotion it is important to grasp the fact that those who first used this formula fully recognized that the Ave Maria was merely a form of greeting. It was therefore long customary to accompany the words with some external gesture of homage, a genuflection, or least an inclination of the head. Of St. Aybert, in the twelfth century, it is recorded that he recited 150 Hail
Mary's daily, 100 with genuflections and 50 with prostrations. So Thierry tells us of St. Louis of France that "without counting his other prayers the holy King knelt down every evening fifty times and each time he stood upright then knelt again and repeated slowly an Ave Maria." Kneeling at the Ave Maria was enjoined in several of the religious orders. So in the Ancren Riwle (q.v.), a treatise which an examination of the Corpus Christi manuscript 402 shows to be of older date than the year 1200, the sisters are instructed that, at the recitation both of the Gloria Patri and the Ave Maria in the Office, they are either to genuflect or to incline profoundly according to the ecclesiastical season. In this way, owing to the fatigue of these repeated prostrations and
genuflections, the recitation of a number of Hail Mary's was often regarded as a penitential exercise, and it is recorded of certain canonized saints, e.g. the Dominican nun St. Margaret (d. 1292),
daughter of the King of Hungary, that on certain days she recited the Ave a thousand times with a thousand prostrations. This concept of the Hail Mary as a form of salutation explains in some measure the practice, which is certainly older than the epoch of St. Dominic, of repeating the greeting as many as 150 times in succession. The idea is akin to that of the "Holy, Holy, Holy", which we are taught to think goes up continually before the throne of the Most High.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE HAIL MARY
In the time of St. Louis the Ave Maria ended with the words of St. Elizabeth: "benedictus fructus ventris tui"; it has since been extended by the introduction both of the Holy Name and of a clause of petition. As regards the addition of the word "Jesus," or, as it usually ran in the fifteenth century, "Jesus Chrustus, Amen", it is commonly said that this was due to the initiative of Pope Urban IV (1261) and to the confirmation and indulgence of John XXII. The evidence does not seem sufficiently clear to warrant positive statement on the point. Still, there, can be no doubt that this was the widespread belief of the later Middle Ages. A popular German religious manual of the fifteenth century ("Der Selen Troïst", 1474) even divides the Hail Mary into four portions, and declares that the first part was composed by the Angel Gabriel, the second by St. Elizabeth, the third, consisting only of the Sacred Name. Jesus Christus, by the popes, and the last, i.e. the word Amen, by the Church.
THE HAIL MARY AS A PRAYER
It was often made a subject of reproach against the Catholics by the Reformers that the Hail Mary which they so constantly repeated was not properly a prayer. It was a greeting which contained no petition (see. e.g. Latimer, Works, II, 229-230). This objection would seem to have long been felt, and as a consequence it was uncommon during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for those who recited their Aves privately to add some clause at the end, after the words "ventris tui Jesus". Traces of this practice meet us particularly in the verse paraphrases of the Ave which date from this period. The most famous of these is that attributed, though incorrectly, to Dante, and belonging in any case to the first half of the fourteenth century. In this paraphrase the Hail Mary ends with the following words:
O Vergin benedetta, sempre tu
Ora per noi a Dio, che ci perdoni,
E diaci grazia a viver si quaggiu
Che'l paradiso al nostro fin ci doni;
(Oh blessed Virgin, pray to God for us always, that He may pardon us and give us grace, so to live here below that He may reward us with paradise at our death.)
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