Hail Mary

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The Hail Mary, known in Latin as the Ave Maria, is the central prayer addressed to Mary in Catholic devotion: a short salutation and request that she intercede with God on behalf of the one praying. It is recited far more often than any other Marian prayer, chiefly as the repeated refrain of the rosary, where it is told out fifty or more times across the cycle of beads.

The prayer was assembled in stages, and its seams are still visible. Its first half is drawn almost word for word from the Gospel of Luke: the angel Gabriel’s greeting at the Annunciation — Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee — joined to Elizabeth’s words when the pregnant Mary visits her, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. By the high Middle Ages these two scriptural greetings had fused into a single devotional formula and were being recited in sequence; the name of Jesus was added at the join. For centuries this was the whole of the prayer — a salutation, not a petition.

The second half came later. The line Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death developed gradually in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was fixed in its standard form when it appeared in the Roman Breviary issued after the Council of Trent. With it the prayer changed character: what had been an echo of the gospel became an explicit appeal for Mary’s help, twice over — now, and at the moment of dying. The title Mother of God, the Greek Theotokos, carries the weight of an old doctrinal decision, affirmed at the Council of Ephesus in 431, that the one Mary bore was God incarnate.

What practitioners hold the prayer to do follows from that title. In Catholic teaching Mary does not answer prayer herself; she is asked to carry the petitioner’s request to her son, intercession rather than worship — a distinction the tradition has long been careful to insist on, and one that the Protestant Reformers rejected outright, holding that prayer belongs to God alone. The Hail Mary became, in consequence, one of the sharpest dividing lines between Catholic and Protestant practice.

Its later life is largely musical. The opening Latin words have been set hundreds of times, and a few of those settings — Schubert’s, and the Bach–Gounod adaptation — are among the most widely recognized pieces of religious music in the West, often performed by people with no devotional intent at all. The phrase has also passed into ordinary speech as a figure for a desperate last attempt, a long shot thrown when nothing else is left: the secular residue of a prayer once meant for the hour of death.

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