Thoughts on the "Hail Mary" (Ave Maria)

Some of you know that at night I keep a notebook beside my bed. I record in it snippets of dreams and other things that come to me. Twice recently, words from the "Hail Mary" prayer have come to me in that way. Now, I would like it to be clear that, although I was raised Catholic, I do not practice that religion or any other. I am, though, a respecter of all religions, to the extent that they deserve it. I should also confess that, after high school, I spent two and a half months in a Jesuit novitiate, where we recited the Rosary, including the Hail Mary, in Latin, every day. Sometimes we barely had time to squeeze it in, so we had to say those Latin words very fast.

Be that as it may, I do not think that I have said either a Rosary or a Hail Mary in the last 57 years. I do not know why the words would come to me in a dream, or what it could mean, if anything. But I am a respecter of dreams and other things that come to us in the sleep state, so I did a little research.

Only the first part of the Hail Mary/Ave Maria prayer has a scriptural basis. That basis is in Lk I:28 and Lk I:42. In my edition of the Vulgate, we have these words:

have gratia plena  Dominus tecum
benedicta tu in mulieribus . . .
et benedictus fructus ventris tui

In English: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is (or be) with you.
Blessed are you among women . . .
and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

After this come the Magnificat, a beautiful passage that is, for the most part, a mosaic of lines from the Psalms. I will have more to say about that beautiful passage on another occasion.

What I have quoted above is the scriptural basis for the "Hail Mary" prayer. The prayer, unlike Luke's Gospel, includes the names of Mary and Jesus.

But since the sixteenth century the "Hail Mary" has had a second part, which is the following sentence:

sancta maria mater Dei ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora mortis nostrae

English: Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

This "second part" of the "Hail Mary" prayer does not have a scriptural basis. I find it interesting that, while I was saying those words in Latin in the novitiate, I always thought of the "second part" as somehow separate. As it turns out, there is no evidence for the added sentence before at least 1514. Some attribute the added words to Peter Canisius, a Dutch Jesuit who lived from 1521 to 1597, but this is not certain.

Even in the seminary, certain things about the "second part" of the prayer bothered me. First, the phrase "mother of God" did not sit very well with me. I now know that Jesus (Rabbi Yeshua) never claimed to be God. No Jew would. It would be the worst form of blasphemy. Secondly, to have Mary praying for us, interceding for us with the (male, of course) Deity, robs her of any power of her own. There are few women of prominence in the New Testament, and to demote and diminish one of them after 1500 years seems to me a crime against her and against all women.

Thirdly, to think of us humans primarily as sinners strikes me as medieval and bad psychology. The idea of Original Sin, which colored all Christian thinking in the Middle Ages, was popularized by Augustine of Hippo in about 400 CE. Such negative thinking about humans becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I am, rather, a partisan of Matthew Fox's concept of Original Blessing, believing that it will lead us to better results.

In 1960, when I was reciting those Latin words and feeling twinges of discomfort about the "second part," I was not yet consciously a feminist. But I have consciously been one for almost forty-five years, and I will not accept the subtly nefarious actions of the Patriarchy just because the title "Saint" is affixed to the names of the perpetrators. If this makes me a heretic, then so be it.

Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.