Theopedia

The Angelical Salutation

Definition

The Angelical Salutation, also called the Hail Mary or Ave Maria, is a prayer used in Roman Catholicism that joins the angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary at the annunciation, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:28), to Elizabeth’s greeting at the visitation, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (Luke 1:42), and closes with a later-added petition asking Mary to pray for the one praying. It is one of the two prayers recited on the beads of the Rosary.

Text

English

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.

Latin

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Biblical Basis

The prayer’s first half is a direct join of two Gospel of Luke texts. The angel Gabriel addresses Mary as “favored one” and tells her “the Lord is with you” while announcing that she will bear the Son of God (Luke 1:26-31). Soon after, Mary’s kinswoman Elizabeth, “filled with the Holy Spirit,” repeats and extends the greeting, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (Luke 1:41-42). Both statements are reported speech within the narrative, addressed to Mary at a specific moment; neither is a prayer Scripture instructs believers to repeat back to her.

Historical Development

The petition that closes the prayer, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” has no biblical source. It asks Mary to intercede, which places it within the wider Roman Catholic practice of invoking the saints: addressing prayer to a departed believer and asking them to carry a request to God. The Council of Trent, at its twenty-fifth session (1563), made that practice binding Roman Catholic teaching, instructing bishops to teach the faithful

that the saints, reigning together with Christ, offer their prayers to God for men; that it is good and useful to invoke them suppliantly and to have recourse to their prayers, aid, and assistance for obtaining benefits from God through his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who alone is our redeemer and savior.1

The Reformed confessions, drafted in the same era, rejected the practice by name. The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) objects to prayer offered “for the honor, veneration and remembrance of the saints in heaven.”2 The Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) call invocation of saints “a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.”3 The Second London Baptist Confession (1677/1689), following Westminster (1646), restricts prayer to God alone:

Religious worship is to be given to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to him alone; not to angels, saints, or any other creatures; and since the fall, not without a mediator, nor in the mediation of any other but Christ alone.4

Reformed Assessment

The prayer’s two halves raise different questions. The opening greeting is Scripture itself and states nothing beyond what Luke records. The title “Mother of God,” Greek Theotokos, is likewise not, on its own, a departure from historic Christian orthodoxy: the Council of Ephesus (431) affirmed the underlying claim, that Mary bore one who was truly God as well as truly man, against Nestorius’s objection that it compromised Christ’s humanity.

The closing petition is what Reformed theology objects to, not the opening greeting. Asking Mary to “pray for us sinners” treats her as capable of hearing and answering prayer from wherever she now is, a claim Charles Hodge calls superstitious on its own terms: it “assumes, without any evidence from Scripture or experience, that the spirits of the dead are accessible to those who are still in the flesh; that they are near us, capable of hearing our prayers, knowing our thoughts, and answering our requests.”5 Herman Bavinck locates the same problem in how Scripture treats death itself: “the whole of Scripture proceeds from the idea that death is a total break with life on this side of the grave… [the dead] belong to another realm, one that is totally separate from the earth.”6 John Calvin ties the same objection to Christ’s own sufficiency as mediator: “if we attribute prayer to them, let us not imagine that they have any other way of supplicating God than through Christ, who alone is the way, or that their prayers are accepted by God.”7 The Angelical Salutation is the best-known instance, in Roman Catholic devotional life, of invoking the saints generally.

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

  • Hail Mary, Catholic Encyclopedia: the prayer’s history and use from a Roman Catholic perspective.

References

  1. Council of Trent, session 25 (1563), decree “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images,” quoted in Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 280. ↩

  2. The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 21, “Of the Holy Supper of the Lord.” ↩

  3. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571), art. 22, “Of Purgatory.” ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 2. ↩

  5. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 282. ↩

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩

  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 20. ↩