Was Mary really the mother of God? What does the Bible say? Lets
find out.
The angel (Gabriel) told Mary that she was highly favored, and
for this reason had been chosen to give birth to the "Son of the
Highest" and "Son of God" NOT "God the Son". God
existed before Mary, not the other way around. He always referred to himself as
the Son of Man. Jesus never made the claim that he was God, he always acknowledged his
subordinate position to his father.
Yes, Mary was greatly blessed to become the mother of the Christ, not the
mother of God.
Mary is dead and waiting for the resurrection, can praying to the dead
instead of the Lord really accomplish anything?
The Hail Mary (sometimes called the "Angelical
salutation", sometimes, from the first words in its Latin form, the
"Ave Maria") is the most familiar of all the prayers used by the
Chatholic Church in honor of our Mary.
It is commonly described as consisting of three parts. The first,
"Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou
amongst women", embodies the words used by the Angel Gabriel in saluting
the Blessed Virgin (Luke, I, 28). The second, "and blessed is the fruit
of thy womb (Jesus)", is borrowed from the Divinely inspired greeting of Elizabeth (Luke 1:42), which attaches itself the more naturally to the
first part, because the words "benedicta tu in mulieribus" (I, 28)
or "inter mulieres" (I, 42) are common to both salutations. Finally,
the petition "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at
the hour of our death. Amen." is stated by the official "Catechism
of the Council of Trent" to have been framed by the Church itself.
"Most rightly", says the Catechism, "has the Holy Church of God
added to this thanksgiving, petition also and the invocation of the most holy
Mother of God, thereby implying that we should piously and suppliantly have
recourse to her in order that by her intercession she may reconcile God with
us sinners and obtain for us the blessing we need both for this present life
and for the life which has no end."
It was antecedently probable that the striking words of the Angel's
salutation would be adopted by the faithful as soon as personal devotion to
the Mother of God manifested itself in the Church. The Vulgate rendering, Ave
gratia plena, "Hail full of grace", has often been criticized as too
explicit a translation of the Greek chaire kecharitomene, but the words arein
any case most striking, and the Anglican words are in any case most striking,
and the Anglican Revised Version now supplements the "Hail, thouthat art
highly favoured" of the original Authorized Version by the marginal
alternative, "Hail thou, endued with grace". We are not surprised,
then, to find these or analogous words employed in a Syriac ritual attributed
to Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (c. 513), or by Andrew of Crete and St. John
Damascene, or again the "Liber Antiphonarious" of St. Gregory the
Great as the offertory of the Mass for the fourth Sunday of Advent. But such
examples hardly warrant the conclusion that the Hail Mary was at that early
period used in the Church as a separate formula of Catholic devotion.
Similarly a story attributing the introduction of the Hail Mary to St.
Ildephonsus of Toledo must probably be regarded as apocryphal. The legend
narrates how St. Ildephonsus going to the church by night found our Blessed
Lady seated in the apse in his own episcopal hair with a choir of virgins
around her who were singing her praises. Then St. Ildephonsus approached
"making a series of genuflections and repeating at each of them those
words of the Angel's greeting: `Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee,
blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb'".
Our Lady then showed her pleasure at this homage and rewarded the saint with
the gift of a beautiful chasuble (Mabillon, Acta SS. O.S.B., saec V, pref.,
no. 119). The story, however, in this explicit form cannot be traced further
back than Hermann of Laon at the beginning of the twelfth century.
In point of fact there is little or no trace of the Hail Mary as an
accepted devotional formula before about from certain versicles and
responsories occurring in the Little Office or Cursus of the Blessed Virgin
which just at that time was coming into favour among the monastic orders. Two
Anglo-Saxon manuscripts at the British Museum, one of which may be as old as
the year 1030, show that the words "Ave Maria" etc. and "benedicta
tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui" occurred in almost
every part of the Cursus, and though we cannot be sure that these clauses were
at first joined together so as to make one prayer, there is conclusive
evidence that this had come to pass only a very little later. (See "The
Month", Nov., 1901, pp. 486-8.) The great collections of Mary-legends
which began to be formed in the early years of the twelfth century (see
Mussafia, "Marien-legenden") show us that this salutation of our
Lady was fast becoming widely prevalent as a form of private devotion, though
it is not quite certain how far it was customary to include the clause
"and blessedis the fruit of thy womb". But Abbot Baldwin, a
Cistercian who was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1184, wrote before this
date a sort of paraphrase of the Ave Maria in which he says:
To this salutation of the Angel, by which we daily greet the most Blessed
Virgin, with such devotion as we may, we are accustomed to add the words,
"and blessed is the fruit of thy womb," by which clause Elizabeth at
a later time, on hearing the Virgin's salutation to her, caught up and
completed, as it were, the Angel's words, saying: "Blessed are thou
amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb."
Not long after this (c. 1196) we meet a synodal decree of Eudes de Sully,
Bishop of Paris, enjoining upon the clergy the see that the "Salutation
of the Blessed Virgin" was familiarly known to their flocks as well as
the Creed and the Lord's Prayer; and after this date similar enactments become
frequent in every part of the world, beginning in England with the Synod of
Durham in 1217.
THE HAIL MARY AS A SALUTATION
To understand the early developments of this devotion it is important to
grasp the fact that those who first used this formula fully recognized that
the Ave Maria was merely a form of greeting. It was therefore long customary
to accompany the words with some external gesture of homage, a genuflection,
or least an inclination of the head. Of St. Aybert, in the twelfth century, it
is recorded that he recited 150 Hail Marys daily, 100 with genfluctions and 50
with prostrations. So Thierry tells us of St. Louis of France that
"without counting his other prayers the holy King knelt down every
evening fifty times and each time he stood upright then knelt again and
repeated slowly an Ave Maria." Kneeling at the Ave Maria was enjoined in
several of the religious orders. So in the Ancren Riwle (q.v.), a treatise
which an examination of the Corpus Christi manuscript 402 shows to be of older
date than the year 1200, the sisters are instructed that, at the recitation
both of the Gloria Patri and the Ave Maria in the Office, they are either to
genuflect or to incline profoundly according to the ecclesiastical season. In
this way, owing to the fatigue of these repeated prostrations and genufletions,
the recitation of a number of Hail Marys wasoften regarded as a penitential
exercise, and it is recorded of certain canonized saints, e.g. the Dominican
nun St. Margaret (d. 1292), daughterof the King of Hungary, that on certain
days she recited the Ave a thousand times with a thousand prostrations. This
concept of the Hail Mary as a form of salutation explains in some measure the
practice, which is certainly older than the epoch of St. Dominic, of repeating
the greeting as many as 150 times in succession. The idea is akin to that of
the "Holy, Holy, Holy", which we are taught to think goes up
continually before the throne of the Most High.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE HAIL MARY
In the time of St. Louis the Ave Maria ended with the words of St.
Elizabeth: "benedictus fructus ventris tui"; it has since been
extended by the introduction both of the Holy Name and of a clause of
petition. As regards the addition of the word "Jesus," or, as it
usually ran in the fifteenth century, "Jesus Chrustus, Amen", it is
commonly said that this was due to the initiative of Pope Urban IV (1261) and
to the confirmation and indulgence of John XXII. The evidence does not seem
sufficiently clear to warrant positive statement on the point. Still, there,
can be no doubt that this was the widespread belief of the later Middle Ages.
A popular German religious manual of the fifteenth century ("Der Selen
Troïst", 1474) even divides the Hail Mary into four portions, and
declares that the first part was composed by the Angel Gabriel, the second by
St. Elizabeth, the third, consisting only of the Sacred Name. Jesus Christus,
by the popes, and the last, i.e. the word Amen, by the Church.
THE HAIL MARY AS A PRAYER
It was often made a subject of reproach against the Catholics by the
Reformers that the Hail Mary which they so constantly repeated was not
properly a prayer. It was a greeting which contained no petition (see. e.g.
Latimer, Works, II, 229-230). This objection would seem to have long been
felt, and as a consequence it was not uncommon during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries for those who recited their Aves privately to add some
clause at the end, after the words "ventris tui Jesus". Traces of
this practice meet us particularly in the verse paraphrases of the Ave which
date from this period. The most famous of these is that attributed, though
incorrectly, to Dante, and belonging in any case to the first half of the
fourteenth century. In this paraphrase the Hail Mary ends with the following
words:
O Vergin benedetta, sempre tu
Ora per noi a Dio, che ci perdoni,
E diaci grazia a viver si quaggiu
Che'l paradiso al nostro fin ci doni;
(Oh blessed Virgin, pray to God for us always, that He may pardon us and
give us grace, so to live here below that He may reward us with paradise at
our death.)
(Oh blessed Virgin, pray to God for us always, that He may pardon us and
give us grace, so to live here below that He may reward us with paradise at
our death.)
Comparing the versions of the Ave existing in various languages, e.g.
Italian, Spanish, German, Provençal, we find that there is a general tendency
to conclude with an appeal for sinners and especially for help at the hour of
death. Still a good deal of variety prevailed in these forms of petition. At
the close of the fifteenth century there was not any officially approved
conclusion, though a form closely resembling our present one was sometimes
designated as "the prayer of Pope Alexander VI" (see "Der
Katholik", April, 1903, p. 334), and was engraved separately on bells (Beisesel,
"Verehrung Maria", p. 460). But for liturgical purposes the Ave down
to the year 1568 ended with "Jesus, Amen", and an observation in the
"Myroure of our Ldy" written for the Bridgettine nuns of Syon,
clearly indicates the generally feeling. "Some saye at the begynnyng of
this salutacyon Ave benigne Jesu and some saye after `Maria mater Dei', with
other addycyons at the ende also. And such thinges may be saide when folke
saye their Aves of theyr own devocyon. But in the servyce of the chyrche, I
trowe it to be moste sewer and moste medeful (i.e. meritorious) to obey the
comon use of saying, as the chyrche hath set, without all such addicions."
We meet the Ave as we know it now, printed in the breviary of the
Camaldolese monks, and in that of the Order de Mercede c. 1514. Probably this,
the current form of Ave, came from Italy, and Esser asserts that it is to be
found written exactly as we say it now in the handwriting of St. Antoninus of
Florence who died in 1459. This, however, is doubtful. What is certain is that
an Ave Maria identical with our own, except for the omission of the single
word nostrae, stands printed at the head of the little work of Savonarola's
issued in 1495, of which there is a copy in the British Museum. Even earlier
than this, in a French edition of the "Calendar of Shepherds" which
appeared in is repeated in Pynson's English translation a few years later in
the form: "Holy Mary moder of God praye for us synners. Amen.". In
an illustration which appears in the same book, the pope and the whole Church
are depicted kneeling before our Lady and greeting her with this third part of
the Ave. The official recognition of the Ave Maria in its complete form,
though foreshadowed in the words of the Catechism of the Council of Trent, as
quoted at the beginning of this article, was finally given in the Roman
Breviary of 1568.
One or two other points connected with the Hail Mary can only be briefly
touched upon. It would seem that in the Middle Ages the Ave often become so
closely connected with the Pater noster, that it was treated as a sort of
farsura, or insertion, before the words et ne nos inducas in tentationem when
the Pater noster was said secreto (see several examples quoted in "The
Month", Nov., 1901, p. 490). The practice of preachers interrupting their
sermons near the beginning to say the Ave Maria seems to have been introduced
in the Middle Ages and to be of Franciscan origin (Beissel, p. 254). A curious
illustration of its retention among English Catholics in the reign of James II
may be found in the "Diary" of Mr. John Thoresby (I, 182). It may
also be noticed that although modern Catholic usage is agreed in favouring the
form "the Lord is with thee", this is a comparatively recent
development. The more general custom a century ago was to say "our Lord
is with thee", and Cardinal Wiseman in one of his essays strongly
reprobates change (Essays on Various Subjects, I, 76), characterizing it as
"stiff, cantish and destructive of the unction which the prayer
breathes". Finally it may be noticed that in some places, and notably in
Ireland, the feeling still survives that the Hail Mary is complete with the
word Jesus. Indeed the writer is informed that within living memory it was not
uncommon for Irish peasant, when bidden to say Hail Marys for a penance, to
ask whether they were required to say the Holy Marys too. Upon the Ave Maria
in the sense of Angelus, see ANGELUS. On account of its connection with the
Angelus, the Ave Maria was often inscribed on bells. One such bell at Eskild
in Denmark, dating from about the year 1200, bears the Ave Maria engraved upon
it in runic characters. (See Uldall, "Danmarks Middelalderlige
Kirkeklokker", Copenhagen, 1906, p. 22.)
From The Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 vols. (Robert Appleton Co.,
1907-1912). Text in the public domain.
