January 1st is an extremely important day in the Catholic liturgical year. This is a day of double delight as, apart from being the first day of a new year, it is also the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of God. It is a day of commemoration of the divine and virginal motherhood of Mary and her role in the salvation of man.
The Catholic veneration of Mary is a stickler point to many Protestant Christians and other non-Christians. Many people see this as Catholic idol-worship and prayer to another God apart from the Holy Trinity.
Much of the controversy stems from very different definitions of worship. Worship is both of an act and of a person. The Catholic definition of the act of worship, as with the older institutions (such as the Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran Churches etc) is a liturgical and sacramental petition to Jesus and God culminating, especially in the Catholic case, in the celebration of the Eucharist in the Mass. All Catholic worship is an act of veneration of the Lord Jesus and the Divine Trinity.
The Mass is a celebration of the scandal of salvation. It is an act of worship that begins in the Old Testament through to the New Testament and climaxes in the divine act of Love which is the crucifixion at Calvary, through His resurrection and ascension into heaven results in the completion of His act of sacrifice and prompts Catholics to celebrate the Eucharist in memory of him as he commanded. There are Feast-days, Solemnities and Memorials (Birthdays, Anniversaries and Days of Memorial) but eventually the Mass is still a celebration of human salvation in Jesus Christ and the continuing configuration of the person in the character of Christ.
Veneration also means worship and Catholic veneration of Mary is worshipping of a God; not some god Mary, but the same God of Abraham, Moses and Jacob. The same God that Jesus calls Abba. This is the same God that Catholics worship in the veneration of the Saints. Nothing more exemplifies Marian devotion than the famous prayer of the Hail Mary using the Rosary.
There are many myths concerning the Rosary and how the faithful began using it as a tool for prayer, among the myths include a revelation from Mary to St Dominic (founder of the Dominican Order) to aid him in overcoming the Albigensian heresy. A less romantic hypothesis was that the rosary was borrowed from the Muslims (probably within Spain prior to the successful conclusion of the Reconquista). It was used to aid monks in praying the psalms/ office of the hours (monks are required to pray the whole psalm everyday). And because of general illiteracy and low levels of education, it was adopted as a means of devotion among the masses.
The Hail Mary was written around the 10th century and came to its present form around the 14th century. The Hail Mary is as follows,
Hail Mary, full of grace,
The Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women,
And blessed is the fruit of your womb,
Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners now,
And at the hour of our death.
Amen
(A beautiful, latin version of the prayer sung by Andrea Bocelli is available on Youtube[1].)
What follows is my personal attempt at putting into word my understanding of the prayer, so as to aid in my understanding of this prayer. My understanding of this prayer is based on the Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Marie (2002) by Pope John Paul II[2] and a speech given by St Josemaria Escriva de Belanguer[3] (founder of Opus Dei). I submit my understanding to the direction and discretion of Church and the Bishops of the church.
The Hail Mary is Marian in praise, but thoroughly Christo-centric. It can be broken down into three parts the Praise, the Hinge and the Intercession.
The Praise – The Joyous Exhortation
The prayer begins with an honouring of Mary, a combination of the words that the Archangel Gabriel greeted Mary with (Luke 1:28) and the admiration Elizabeth lavished on Mary (Luke 1:42). Who do they praise? What do these words praise? Why do they praise?
Mary is a creation of God and she is being applauded as the most blessed of woman and having a fullness of grace, because she is an especially chosen creation of God. The Archangel Gabriel says “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women”. To hail is to greet and cheer, to salute and acclaim. Gabriel is acclaiming Mary, who is full of grace, because the Lord is with her. It is the fact that the Lord is with her, that she has been chosen for a very special act – to bear Jesus – that she is “Blessed among women.”
Elizabeth, echoes the Archangel when she sees Mary, “Blessed are thou among woman and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”
Like in an art gallery, the creation is being praised to the delight of its creator. No artist would stop an audience from praising his works; no parent would redirect praise of their children to themselves; no chef would refuse praise to his food since praise of the creation is praise of it creator. These words therefore congratulate Mary for her election and through this, pay tribute to God. She has been greatly privileged to be chosen from the multitudes to bear the saviour. For Mary is just another woman if not for God, if not for His special selection of her, choosing her as a vessel for Him, and making her full of grace, Mary would just be another typical Jewish girl, commonly named Mariam.
We then move on to the idea of the hinge of the prayer, on which the whole prayer stands.
The Hinge – The Divine Reason
As mentioned above, Mary is special because she bears Jesus. And this is who the hinge of the prayer depends. Regrettably though, there is occasionally the tendency to gloss over this hinge when reciting the prayer, which then nullifies all the contemplation involved in it.
Jesus – the fruit of the womb, it is Him that makes the prayer sensible. He is perfect because he is God, our salvation; He is the reason for joy. He is the Son of Man and the Son of God that will come and make the perfect offering of the covenant, the perfect offering that Adam, Moses and David could not make.
If not for Jesus, the praise of Mary does not make sense, it becomes hypocritical, and it devolves into giving false witness and praise to something that does not exist. It is like lavishing the greatest of superlatives on someone who has really done nothing. However, because she did the will of God, and gave birth to Jesus, the prayer of praise becomes sensible.
Also, it is Jesus that makes one confident in praise. When the Archangel Gabriel first appeared to Mary in the Annunciation scene, the first words he said to her was “Be not afraid”. This is a message that is also sent to us when we pray the Hail Mary. Be not afraid – Emmanuel, God with us.
The Intercession – The Sincere Request
The second part is a case of asking for Mary to pray for us to God and again turns of the fulcrum that is the hinge of Christ.
Just as we ask our friends and family to pray for us, we too can ask our divine Mother to pray for us. God commands us to honour our parents, and He too in His life honoured Mary (and continues to do so). Note how he performed his first miracle on her request, although his time had not come and how his last deed was entrusting her to us. On the cross at Calvary, Jesus told Mary, “Woman, this is your son,” and he told John, his disciple, “Man, this is your mother,” and John took her into his home. With this act, Jesus essentially commends Mary to be our mother and asks us to make a special place for her in our hearts.
And it makes even more sense to ask someone so blessed and holy to pray for us. God listens to us even as imperfect sinners, wouldn’t he then listen to his mother’s prayers for us, prayers for what is really good for us, not in the sense of the human world, but in the sense of our real need?
Mary is holy because God makes her “full of grace”. She also is the Mother of God, because Jesus is (as Christians believe) both fully God and fully Man. Just as she is the Mother of the human Jesus, because of his complete divinity, she becomes logically speaking, the Mother of God.
Going back to the second part of the prayer, we see it as a very cute way of asking for help. In any interaction, we are usually especially polite when we ask for help, and sometimes we engage in praise. It is rude and arrogant to ask for help without being polite to the person that we ask, hence we see that the first section of the prayer is praise; the second part also begins with praise. Praise can be duplicitous and insincere making us a double-headed Janus if it not deserving, but if it speaks the truth it then the person who is praised is completely worthy of it. The Virgin Mary is a humble woman of virtue, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t like hearing nice things. Also the praise, Holy Mary and Mother of God, as aforementioned are truthful and proper articles of faith.
The prayer ends with the appeal, “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” If she is praying for us, she has to be praying to someone for us. And who else but the God that she gave birth to? We realise that without Jesus, the Hail Mary is incomprehensible, garbled nonsense. This serves to explain the role of Mary and the Saints.
Although Mary is no longer physically with us, she is not dead. The Sadducees tried to test Jesus about dead people to whom Jesus corrected and said that Moses had already proven that the physically dead are brought to real life in God, “And Moses clearly proves that the dead are raised to life. In the passage about the burning bush he speaks of the Lord as ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Issac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is the God of the living, not of the dead, for to him all are alive.” (Luke 20: 37, 38) Similarly, in the Garden of Eden, God admonished Adam against eating the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge lest he “die die” The double repetition serves to emphasise the death, but how much more dead can on get then dead, unless physical death is the first while spiritual death is the second, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matthew 10:28) Someone who is really dead cannot know and do anything, but someone who is really alive certainly can pray for us.
The Hail Mary and the Rosary
The Hail Mary is most commonly said with the Rosary, and in this case, the Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Marie (2002) puts it most clearly when it says, “To recite the Rosary is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ.” (Introduction, Paragraph 3). Or as St Louis de Montfort says, “to Jesus, through Mary”
The Hail Mary cannot be said in isolation and apart from the major Christian prayer, The Lord’s Prayer/The Our Father. The Our Father, being the prayer that Jesus taught the disciples is an example of how we should pray to God and the Hail Mary is styled on the Our Father:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
The Hail Mary can be seen as an extension of The Lord’s Prayer, asking Mary to pray for us the very same prayer that we pray for ourselves.
As can be seen, Marian devotion is ultimately aimed and directed “[doing] what [Jesus] tells us”. Just as the servants at the wedding in Cana listened to Mary and did what Jesus told them to do, so that he performed a miracle, we too by listening to Mary, our divine mother, are pointed in the direction of Christ and doing what he tells us to. When we want to learn something, we approach the best to learn it. In this case, if we want to learn how to be good disciples of God (who is Love) shouldn’t we approach the best disciple to learn how to do it?
It is in the reflection of the mysteries of the Rosary, and the prayerful, sincere repetition of the Hail Mary that helps in meditating on and developing a deeper relationship with Christ. Once again, Pope John Paul explains, “in effect, the Rosary is simply a method of contemplation. As a method, it serves as a means to an end and cannot become an end in itself… Otherwise there is a risk that the Rosary would not only fail to produce the intended spiritual effects, but even that the beads, with which it is usually said, could come to be regarded as some kind of amulet or magic object, thereby radically distorting their meaning and function.” (Chapter 3, Paragraph 28)
Mariology and the veneration of saints as we can see are therefore not themselves the ends.
The end remains, and should always be God, as Mary says herself in the Magnificat,
My soul doth magnify the Lord.
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid;
for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
Because he that is mighty,
hath done great things to me;
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is from generation unto generations,
to them that fear him.
He hath shewed might in his arm:
he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
and hath exalted the humble.
He hath filled the hungry with good things;
and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath received Israel his servant,
being mindful of his mercy:
As he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his seed for ever.
(Luke 1: 46-55)
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Qu15k24SA
[2] http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_20021016_rosarium-virginis-mariae_en.html
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I have seen some analyses of the Hail Mary in which one tries to get at its meaning from a linguistically hebrew/aramaic angle (i.e., translating it into the semitic tongue and then analyze the meaning of the words used). For example, I believe that the term used for “full of grace” is a term etymologically related to “hesed”. Sorry I can’t provide any links (I don’t believe I saved any of them, though I’m sure of you search around the internet you might find something; try the blog Vivificat, for example). Anyway, good insights. Pax Christi!