How to pray the Angelus: the Word made flesh, remembered three times a day

IThe Angelus in full

The Angelus is three short exchanges on the Annunciation, each followed by a Hail Mary, then a versicle and a closing prayer. V. is said by whoever leads, R. by everyone else; alone, you say both. These are the words as the Raccolta printed them in English in 1910. Where it prints Ave Maria, pray one Hail Mary.

IIHow to pray it, step by step

• Stop what you are doing. Traditionally a church bell gave the signal; a kitchen timer or the noon meal will do.
• Say the first versicle and response: the angel’s message and Mary’s conception by the Holy Ghost. Pray one Hail Mary.
• Say the second: Mary’s answer, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” Pray one Hail Mary.
• Say the third: “And the Word was made Flesh. And dwelt among us.” Pray one Hail Mary.
• Say “Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God” with its response, then the closing prayer, which asks that we who know the Incarnation be brought by the Passion and Cross to the glory of the Resurrection.

The second versicle is St Luke’s own: “And Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38, Douay-Rheims). That is the heart of the prayer. Three times a day a woman stands in her own house and says what Mary said in hers.

IIIWhen to pray the Angelus

The Holy See’s Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (2001, no. 195) says the Angelus is prayed three times daily: at dawn, at mid-day and at dusk. Many keep it at six in the morning, noon and six in the evening; tying it to breakfast, lunch and supper works just as well in a family. The Raccolta of 1910 already allowed those with no bell to hear to pray it at the proper hours, “or thereabouts.”

The old rubric was to kneel on weekdays and to stand from Saturday evening through Sunday, and throughout Eastertide. If a child is on your hip, stand. And when the full prayer is impossible, the Directory itself names the minimum worth keeping: at least three Hail Marys.

IVPraying it with children

Children take to the Angelus because it is a dialogue. Let one child be the bell, or simply the voice that says the V. lines, and let everyone else answer. Small children can carry the responses long before they can read: “And dwelt among us” is easy to learn by ear. Pray the Hail Marys together, slowly enough for the youngest. At a weekend lunch, or at supper every night, it takes less time than setting the table, and it gives the youngest in the house the whole Gospel of the Incarnation in three lines.

VIn Eastertide: the Regina Caeli

By a disposition of Benedict XIV in 1742, the Directory explains (no. 196), the Angelus gives way in paschal time to the antiphon Regina Caeli, which probably dates from the tenth or eleventh century and joins the Incarnation (“whom thou wast made worthy to bear”) to the Resurrection (“hath risen, as He said”). St John Paul II put it simply: “In the Easter Season, the traditional prayer of the Angelus is replaced by the hymn of the Regina Caeli.” On Pentecost Sunday in 2024 the Pope’s midday prayer in St Peter’s Square was still the Regina Caeli; after Pentecost the Angelus returns.

VIWhere the Angelus came from

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) is careful to separate what is certain from what is conjecture. The evening Angelus came first: by the first half of the fourteenth century the custom of saying three Hail Marys at an evening bell had become general across Europe, and Pope John XXII recommended it in 1318 and 1327. Earlier still, a Franciscan General Chapter in the time of St Bonaventure (1263 or 1269) told preachers to urge the people to say Hail Marys when the bell rang for Compline.

A morning bell followed; at Parma in 1318 the bishop asked those who heard it to pray for peace, and it was called “the peace bell.” The midday ringing came last and was long linked to the Passion. The three versicles we use seem first to have appeared in an Italian catechism printed at Venice in 1560, and the full form now in use cannot be traced earlier than 1612. Benedict XIII attached an indulgence to it in 1724, and Leo XIII revised its conditions in 1884.

VIIWhy it is still worth keeping

In 1974 St Paul VI wrote that he had no reform to propose for the Angelus, only an earnest exhortation to keep it:

For a woman whose days are cut into pieces by other people’s needs, that rhythm is a gift. The morning is offered, the middle of the day is reclaimed, the evening is handed back, and each time the centre of the faith is said aloud: God became flesh through a woman’s consent. The Regina Rule tool can hold the noon Angelus as one of your anchors, and the Church in the Home tool sets it into the household’s own rule of prayer.