WHAT IS THE ‘HAIL MARY’ PRAYER?
Saint Luke, a physician turned historian and follower of the Christ, wrote to a figure only identified as Theophilus detailing the story of Jesus Christ—how God’s promised Messiah had come into the world through a virgin birth, died on a cross, was resurrected and ascended into heaven, and how the followers he left behind formed a community following his teachings. At the beginning of his duology (meaning the two books of the Bible he wrote, the Gospel bearing his name and the Acts of the Apostles), he says that he has written this “orderly account … so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.” (1)
Luke is not just writing as a journalist or diarist, in a style of “here’s what happened, and then this, and then this.” He is a historian, a scholar, giving context and analysis as needed, urging the reader to consider “what happened, and what does it all mean?” (2) Luke’s detailed retelling of the narrative of Jesus’s coming and birth, the only full one in the Gospels, encourages us to consider the deeper meanings behind the actions presented.
It is Luke's story of the birth of Jesus where the prayer known as the “Hail Mary” comes from. Because of its prevalence in Roman Catholicism, the text commonly used in the English language specifically comes from the Douay-Rheims Bible, the first translation into English solely from the Latin Bible used by the Catholic Church. Gabriel the Archangel salutes the Blessed Virgin Mary, saying, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” (3) A few verses later, Mary is visiting with her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist, and Elizabeth exclaims, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” (4) An addition of “Mary” to the first quotation, one of “Jesus” to the second, and the removal of the duplicate “blessed” part, and you have the bulk of a prayer known around the world. But before we can even consider what the text means, the question we have to ask first is—who is Mary and why should we pray to her?
The Blessed Virgin Mary is an often discussed figure about whom we know very little outside of the main chronological events of her life. If we stick strictly to the Biblical texts, we know that she was engaged to Joseph, a carpenter, before Gabriel told her that she would bear the Messiah. She agreed; an angel told Joseph to stay with Mary; she visits Elizabeth; the census happens and they go to Bethlehem; she gives birth in a manger; is visited by the Magi; presents her ritual offerings and child at the Temple in Jerusalem; flees to Egypt; returns to Nazareth; goes on pilgrimage to Jerusalem; goes to a wedding where she urges Jesus to perform his first miracle; is present at the crucifixion; and is present in the upper room after his ascension.
Christian tradition holds that Mary was the child of Joachim and Anne, a well-to-do couple, and was, according to Roman Catholics, immaculately conceived (free from original sin unlike every other human). Beyond that, much of the story of Mary differs between different Christian groups —was she always a virgin or not? Was she assumed (taken up) immediately into heaven, and did she actually die? Many of the differences found between denominations can be considered through the lens of what was extant before Martin Luther’s nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 and what came after. While a number of Protestant denominations have pushed away what they see as “Mary-worship” because of Catholic enthusiasm over the last five centuries, many in the mainline (older Protestant denominations) remain in a middle ground, holding to some, but not all, beliefs about the Virgin.
Mary was a popular figure in pre-Reformation writings, and a number of those have influenced our current depiction of her—the second century work called the Protoevangelium of James, supposedly written by James, the half-brother of Jesus, focuses on Mary’s sanctity and the idea that she remained a virgin for the rest of her life after giving birth to Jesus, elaborating on concepts and narratives in Luke and Matthew’s early chapters. Saint Maximus’s Life of the Virgin builds on the concepts presented in the Protoevangelium and presents the first extant full narrative of the life of the Virgin, (5) building the first real foundation for a feminist understanding of Mary beyond the “mother mild” (6) presented in the Gospels, instead presenting a woman with “a uniquely authoritative knowledge of [Christ’s] teachings … [and who] assumes a position of authority within the early church, directing the apostles in their prayers and their preaching.” (7)
Mary’s status as beloved mother of Jesus Christ and as having been directly taken up into heaven rather than going the “regular way” made her a popular saint to ask for her intercession to God for us and others. But why pray for intercession of saints in the first place? It’s important to note that the church does not pray to saints, but rather prays to request intercession from the saints before the throne of God. As Emily Z. Dubie concluded in her introduction to prayer in Earth & Altar’s Christianity 101, prayer is “the triune God inviting us into friendship.” (8) Praying with or alongside saints invites us into further friendship with God through His saints, through those in the faith who preceded us and who can advocate and pray for human needs and concerns in heaven. It is, as Paul describes, the “great cloud of witnesses,” (9) who know intimately what it is like to be fully human. Whether Mary was immaculately conceived or not, she knew what it was like to be human. She was married, had a child (and maybe more), presumably saw her husband die, saw her son tortured and killed, and did all the normal things that humans had to do to stay alive. She was one of us, and she was exalted, assumed into heaven, and is the mother of the King of Creation. With all the saints, official and unofficial, her prayers rise before God at the heavenly altar. (10) We beseech her prayers, as the prayer says, “now and at the hour of our death.”
The core of the Hail Mary is those two aforementioned greetings from Luke’s nativity narratives from Gabriel and Elizabeth. A really significant thing about this section of the prayer is the phrase “blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” This poetic description invites us to reflect on Mary as the second Eve—as Jesus’s death and resurrection reversed Adam’s sin of eating the forbidden fruit, (11) Mary’s “yes” to God reverses Eve’s “no”—she is offering all of us a new fruit, a fruit that offers eternal life. Eve’s disobedience is in some way negated in the light of Mary’s obedience—by joining in Gabriel’s greeting, we remind ourselves of this negation, and we thank Mary, as we ask her to intercede for us, for being this second Eve. As she helped reconcile sinners to God, we ask for her intercession so that she may help reconcile ourselves to God. (12)
But this prayer wasn’t always a prayer. The Reformation-era bishop and martyr Hugh Latimer correctly noted in an article that the original prayer, consisting of those two greetings, the name “Jesus Christ,” and an “Amen,” “is not properly a prayer.” He wrote that “saluting or greeting, lauding or praising, is not properly praying.” (13) We ask Mary to “pray for us,” in the second half of the prayer, an addition attributed to late-fifteenth century Roman Catholics, (14) but that isn’t perhaps the best English translation. “Pray for us” is a translation of the Latin ora pro nobis, and the preposition pro specifically means “for” in the sense of “on behalf of.” “Pray for us,” we beseech Mary, asking her to “pray on our behalf.” We may even rightly hear implied in this request that we are asking her to “pray for us in front of God’s throne” or “pray for us at the altar of God.”
A portion of the Hail Mary that makes it different from other intercessions of the saints is that we ask not just for the Virgin’s prayers now, but for them “at the hour of our death.” This plea, seemingly anticipating the times we find ourselves in now, likely arose as part of the prayer during a previous outbreak of mass sickness—the Black Death or bubonic plague of the fourteenth century. (15) Death is scary, and the global pandemic we continue to live through reminds us of that every day. Pope Francis’s 2015 quote about assassination attempts springs to mind: “I am in God’s hands. If anything should happen to me, I have told the Lord, I ask you only to give me the grace that it doesn’t hurt, because I am not courageous when confronted with pain. I am very timid.” (16) Praying for an easy death isn’t something done often these days outside of the Hail Mary, but this phrase creates an overarching vision of Mary's intercession - that this prayer, traditionally prayed as part of the Angelus three times a day, is to have her intercede for us every day we live and until our death.
We join with saints who have gone before and those who are yet to come in this prayer not because it is pretty, or that it's memorizable, or because we like to pray to Mary. More so than any other saint or angel, it is Mary who knows the human condition the best. Jesus's divinity and the unique circumstances of his life meant that he did not experience parts of the human life like Mary could, and that she, as the closest human to our God (as she did give birth to him), can help us pray better.
Luke 1:3–4 (New Revised Standard Version).
Green, Joel B. The Gospel of Luke. W B Erdmans Pub, 1997. 26.
Luke 1:28 (Douay-Rheims Bible).
Luke 1:42 (DRB).
Shoemaker, Stephen J., Introduction to The Life of the Virgin. Yale U P, 2012. 1.
“Once in Royal David’s City,” C. F. Alexander, in the Hymnal 1982.
Shoemaker, 22–23.
Dubie, Emily Z., “What is Prayer?” in Earth & Altar: Christianity 101.
Hebrews 12:1 (NRSVUE)
Revelation 8:3–4 (NRSVUE)
Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20–23
Cf. Catechism of the Council of Trent.
“Our Lady A Sinner,” in The works of Hugh Latimer, Vol. 2, ed. G. E. Corrie. Cambridge U P, 1845. 229.
Thurston, Herbert, “Hail Mary,” in Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 7. The Encyclopedia Press, 1910.
Sheen, Fulton J., The World’s First Love. Ignatius Press, 1956. 178.
Quoted in “Pope arrives in Philippines amid massive security operation” by Manuel Mogato and Rosemarie Francisco, https://www.reuters.com/article/cnews-us-pope-philippines-idCAKBN0KO0RV20150115.
