Hail Mary
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.
The first half of the Hail Mary comes from the words of the Angel Gabriel (Luke 1:28) and St. Elizabeth (Luke 1:42). The second half asks Mary to pray for us.
Pray it along with us, with every prayer on screen:
Where Does This Prayer Come From?
Most of the Hail Mary isn't ours.
It's the Bible's.
First, an angel walks into a little house in Nazareth.
Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
— Luke 1:28
Then Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth, who is filled with the Holy Spirit and cries out:
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
— Luke 1:42
Wait.
Put those two verses side by side.
That's the first half of the prayer.
Word for word.
Christians repeated those greetings for centuries.
By about the year 1050, they were a common prayer in the West.
Then two names were added.
"Mary," so we know who we're greeting.
"Jesus," so we know who the fruit of her womb is.
That was the whole prayer in the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 1200s.
Where the Second Half Comes From
"Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."
This part grew up later, in the late Middle Ages.
It shows up in print by 1495.
Pope St. Pius V put the full prayer in the Church's official Breviary in 1568.
That's the Hail Mary you pray today.
The title "Mother of God" is much older.
The Church solemnly defended it at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
And it starts in Scripture, too.
Elizabeth calls Mary "the mother of my Lord."
— Luke 1:43
But Isn't This Worshiping Mary?
Many Protestant friends ask this honestly.
So look at what the prayer actually says.
The first half praises what God did for her.
The second half asks her to pray for us.
That's it.
Pray for us.
Not save us.
Not forgive us.
The same thing you'd ask of a friend at church.
You may see it differently.
But you at least have to admit that every word of the first half is straight from the Gospel of Luke.
And Mary herself said it would happen:
For behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
— Luke 1:48
Every time you pray the Hail Mary, you're one of those generations.
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