Traditional prayer
The Hail Mary (Ave Maria)
Hail Mary, full of grace! the Lord is with thee:
blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
Latin
Ave, Maria, gratia plena; Dominus tecum;
benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostræ.
Amen.
About this prayer
The first half of the Hail Mary was first spoken to Mary by others. The angel Gabriel came in to her and said: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:28, Douay-Rheims). Then her kinswoman Elizabeth, when Mary came to her carrying the Child, “cried out with a loud voice, and said: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb” (Luke 1:42). The holy Name joins the two greetings, and the Church adds the plea of her children: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
The Catechism reads the prayer phrase by phrase (CCC 2676–2677). First comes the angel’s greeting, in which God Himself greets Mary: she is full of grace because the Lord dwells in her, and He is the source of every grace. Then comes Elizabeth’s greeting: Mary is called blessed for believing that the Lord’s word would be fulfilled. And because it is through her that Jesus comes to us, she is God’s Mother and ours, so every care may be placed in her keeping, and we ask her to be with us at our death as she was with her Son at His. St. John Paul II pointed to the centre of the prayer: the name of Jesus is “the hinge as it were which joins its two parts” (Rosarium Virginis Mariae, 33).
The prayer grew slowly. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) finds little trace of the Hail Mary as a set formula of devotion before about 1050, when its words were repeated in the versicles of the Little Office of Our Lady. About 1196 Eudes de Sully, Bishop of Paris, told his clergy to see that their people knew the Salutation as well as the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. The closing petition took shape in the fifteenth century, and the prayer in its complete form was officially recognized in the Roman Breviary of 1568.
The English here is the Baltimore Catechism’s of 1885, which calls the prayer by its old name, “The Angelical Salutation.” The Latin is printed beside it as Father Lasance’s prayer book of 1908 gives it.
When to pray it
- Morning and night, and in the dark with a child who will not settle.
- Fifty times in five decades of the Rosary, ten to each mystery.
- Three times in the Angelus, at morning, noon and evening.
- At a deathbed, your own or another’s: it is the hour the prayer itself names.
- When there is no time for anything longer, and when there is no strength for it.