What the Hail Mary Is

I was raised Catholic, I study church history, and these days I am merely a Christian, so I have heard this question from both sides of the aisle and watched both sides answer it badly. "Which Scripture says to worship Mary?" is usually asked as a trap, and it usually gets a slogan back. This letter tries to do the plainer thing: say what the Hail Mary actually is, where each line of it came from, what the Catholic Church claims to be doing when it prays it, and where the Bible draws the line. I do not pray it. But if we are going to disagree with a billion baptized people about a prayer, we should at least know what the prayer says.

The prayer

Three sentences. The first two are the Bible. The third is the question.

The first half is Luke

"Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee" is Gabriel, word for word from the Latin Bible: "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women" (Luke 1:28). The Greek behind "highly favoured" is a single word, kecharitōmenē, one who has been graced; Jerome's Latin rendered it gratia plena, "full of grace," and the prayer follows Jerome. The King James follows the Greek more closely, but both are translating the same angel. Then Elizabeth, "filled with the Holy Ghost," says the second line: "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb" (Luke 1:42). The name "Jesus" at the end of that line was added to the prayer in the thirteenth century; everything else in the first half is Scripture quoted verbatim. Whoever objects to the first half of the Hail Mary is objecting to Luke.

And Mary herself sang what the prayer does. "From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed" (Luke 1:48). Calling her blessed is not idolatry; it is obedience to a prophecy, and the Reformers knew it. Luther kept the feast of the Annunciation and preached on the Magnificat with real warmth. Honor for the mother of the Lord was never the dividing line.

The second half is later, and it is the question

"Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death" is not in the Bible, and the Church has never claimed it was. The first half of the prayer was in use as a devotion by the eleventh century. The petition cannot be traced earlier than the fifteenth, it appears in Savonarola's day, and it was fixed in its present form in the Roman Breviary of 1568. So for most of the church's history the Hail Mary was simply the two verses from Luke, said back to God.

Two things in the added half need separating, because they are different kinds of claim.

"Mother of God." This sounds like the boldest line, and it is the oldest and least controversial. The Greek is Theotokos, God-bearer, and it was affirmed at the Council of Ephesus in 431, not to exalt Mary but to protect Christ: the child she bore was God the Son, one Person, not a man later joined to God. It would be tidier to write “the whole church affirmed it,” and it would not be true. Ephesus is the council that broke a church: Nestorius refused it, the Church of the East never received it, and that body has existed apart ever since (the story is in Where the Lines Got Drawn). What is worth saying is that the objection was never that the title honoured Mary too highly. It was a quarrel about how the two natures of Christ are joined, and in 1994 Rome and the Assyrian Church of the East signed a Common Christological Declaration recognising “the legitimacy and rightness of these expressions of the same faith.” So the title is ancient, and it is about Him, which is the point. Just not unanimous. Elizabeth said it first, "the mother of my Lord" (Luke 1:43). Any Christian who confesses that Jesus is God and that Mary was His mother has already said "Mother of God"; the title is about Him.

"Pray for us sinners." This is the line where the traditions part. Notice first what it does not say. It does not say "save us," "forgive us," or "hear our prayer" as if she were God. It asks Mary to pray, the way you would ask a friend to pray for you. That is the fair reading, and the Catholic reading, and a Protestant who says the prayer asks Mary for salvation is not describing the prayer. The real question is narrower and harder: can the departed hear us at all?

What Rome claims to be doing

The Catholic Church draws a line that most Protestants have never been shown. Worship, which it calls latria, belongs to God alone, and the Church condemns giving it to anyone else. Honor given to the saints it calls dulia, and the higher honor given to Mary hyperdulia, still honor, still a creature. Thomas Aquinas laid the terms out in the thirteenth century, and the Council of Trent, answering the Reformers directly, taught that the saints may be asked for their prayers while insisting that all grace comes through Christ. So "worship Mary" is not what the Church says it does; "ask Mary to pray" is. Whether the line holds in a village procession is a fair thing to wonder, and Catholics themselves wonder it. But when we answer the question, we should answer the claim as it is made.

What Scripture says, both ways

The strongest Catholic texts are these. John sees the elders in heaven with "golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints" (Revelation 5:8), which shows prayer on earth known in heaven. Hebrews says we are "compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1). And Mary's one recorded instruction is the best in the Bible: "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it" (John 2:5). Nobody who takes those texts seriously is worshiping a creature.

But the plain line runs the other way, and it is why I do not pray the second half. Scripture never once shows a believer addressing a departed saint and never once commands it, in either Testament, and the one time it treats the living seeking the dead it forbids it: "should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?" (Isaiah 8:19). Every prayer in the Bible goes to God. The "cloud of witnesses" in Hebrews are watching the race, not being asked to run it. The prayers in Revelation 5 are the saints' own prayers rising, not requests sent to them. And when it comes to mediation, Paul leaves no room: "there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). The Catholic answer is that asking a friend to pray is not mediation, and on earth that is true. The problem is not the asking. It is that Scripture gives us no word that the departed hear, and a practice the Bible never shows, never commands, and once forbids in principle is not one I will build a devotion on. The earliest surviving prayer addressed to Mary, the Sub tuum praesidium, survives on a papyrus that scholars have dated anywhere from the third century to the eighth, with the earliest secure evidence of its use in the fifth; there is nothing of the kind in the New Testament or the apostolic fathers. For the first two centuries, so far as the record shows, Christians honored her and prayed to God.

Jesus set the balance

The Lord was asked this question in His own lifetime, in almost these words. A woman in the crowd cried out, "Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked," which is the Hail Mary's second line said aloud, and He answered: "Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it" (Luke 11:27-28). He did not rebuke the blessing. He redirected it. Mary is blessed, and the thing that makes her blessed is available to anyone: she heard the word of God and kept it. She is also the one who said "My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." (Luke 1:46-47), a woman who knew she needed a Saviour and praised Him for it. The last time Scripture shows her, she is in the upper room, praying with the rest, not being prayed to (Acts 1:14).

And when an angel was offered worship, twice, he refused it in the same words: "See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant… worship God" (Revelation 22:9). I have no doubt Mary would say the same.

Where this lands

Say the first half of the Hail Mary and you have quoted Luke and obeyed a prophecy. Say the second half and you have asked a departed woman to pray for you, which is not worship, but is also not anything the Bible ever shows a believer doing. The honest Protestant position is not "Catholics worship Mary." It is: honor her as Scripture does, call her blessed as Scripture commands, confess that her Son is God, and take your prayers to Him, because He is the one mediator and He is the one we are told hears. Do what she said. "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it."

The Reformer said more about her than his heirs do

There is a version of the Protestant reaction that overshoots. Having refused to pray to her, we grew shy of praising her, until in some quarters the only safe thing to say about Mary is a correction. That is not where the Reformation started, and the man whose name the tradition carries is the easiest place to check it.

Calvin's ordinary way of referring to her, all through his commentary on Luke, is the holy virgin. On the Magnificat he does not hedge:

Nobody suspects Calvin of going soft on Rome. And he is not sentimental about her either, which is what makes him worth quoting rather than quarrying. On her question to Gabriel he says plainly that “the holy virgin appears to confine the power of God within as narrow limits as Zacharias had formerly done.” On Simeon's prophecy of the sword he says she needed the warning:

Honour and correction in the same voice, which is the register Scripture itself uses about her. She is the one called blessed among women, and she is also the one who did not understand Him in the temple and went looking for Him sorrowing. A tradition that can only manage the second half has lost something its own founder held.

For a careful Reformed treatment that comes to the same place, R.C. Sproul's short lesson "Hail Mary?" (Ligonier, the first of his five-part series on Mary) asks whether Rome teaches worship of Mary and then gives her the honor Scripture does. It is fair to both sides, which is the only way to be right about this.

Related: Women in the Bible and the Early Church, Prayer, Where the Church Drifted, Loving the Church You Disagree With, The Word Made Flesh, and St. Robert Bellarmine. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple. The history of the prayer follows the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), "Hail Mary."