The Hail Mary

The Hail Mary — the angel’s greeting, deepened by the Church

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The Hail Mary is the most-prayed prayer in Christian history. In a single Rosary, the faithful pray it more than fifty times. In a lifetime, a soul may pray it tens of thousands of times. Each time, the words begin not with our own — but with the words of an angel.

Two greetings, joined into one prayer

The Hail Mary is in two parts. The first half comes straight from Scripture — in fact, from two passages in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke.

The first sentence — “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee” — are the words of the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation (Luke 1:28). The second sentence — “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb” — are the words of Saint Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, when Mary visited her at the Visitation (Luke 1:42).

The Christian people loved these greetings of Scripture and began to pray them aloud as their own greeting to Mary. By the eleventh century, this first half had become a fixed prayer. The Holy Name of Jesus was added at the end of Elizabeth’s greeting (probably in the early thirteenth century) so that the Mother’s name and her Son’s name would always be spoken together.

The second half — “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death” — was added by the Church over the centuries that followed. It was not a Pope or a Council that wrote it; the faithful themselves added the petition, in many forms, before it was given its final shape in the breviary of Pope Saint Pius V in 1568.

The words of the prayer

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among 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.

What we are saying

Hail Mary, full of grace — we begin where Gabriel began. We honor her with the angel’s honor.

The Lord is with thee — we name the great mystery of her life: God is with her in a way unique to her, the Word made flesh in her womb.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus — we join Elizabeth’s prophecy. The Mother and the Son are blessed together, and we name them both.

Holy Mary, Mother of God — we call her by the title given her by the Council of Ephesus in 431, Theotokos: not just the mother of a man, but the Mother of God-made-man.

Pray for us sinners — we ask not for what only God can give, but for what only a Mother does: pray for me.

Now and at the hour of our death. Amen. — the two hours we most need her: this present moment, and the last one.

How the Hail Mary is prayed

In the Rosary, the Hail Mary is prayed fifty-three times in a complete five-decade Rosary — three at the beginning, then ten on each set of decade beads.

In the Angelus, prayed at six in the morning, at noon, and at six in the evening, the Hail Mary is prayed three times in remembrance of the Annunciation. In many parts of the world, church bells still ring three times each at these hours to call the faithful to pray.

In private devotion, the Hail Mary is the simplest of arrows. A mother whose child is sick. A driver in traffic. A student before an exam. A heart in fear in the middle of the night. Hail Mary, full of grace…

A small reflection

There is a great wisdom in praying the Hail Mary fifty times in a row. The mind tires; the heart begins to drop into the words. Saint Therese of Lisieux said that for years she could not pray the Rosary without distraction — and yet she prayed it. The Mother does not require us to be focused. She only requires us to be present.

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