We continue our journey into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER:
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But this is not where the Tradition ends. For Jesus doesn’t just give us God as our Father. He also gives us Mary as our Mother with the words “Behold your mother” (John 19:27). And so, it’s no coincidence the Our Father and the Hail Mary are closely intertwined in the heart of the Church. For instance, medieval rosaries were called “paternosters” (“Our Fathers”) and by the 12th century, the practice of reciting the Our Father on the beads had given way to reciting 50 or 150 Ave Marias (“Hail Marys”). A biographer of St. Albert the Great, the man who taught St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us, “A hundred times a day he bent his knees, and fifty times he prostrated himself raising his body again by his fingers and toes, while he repeated at every genuflexion: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.'”[1]
Five things are worth noting about this passage. First, despite contemporary Protestant jitters about the practice, the popular move toward asking Mary’s intercession was not a “replacement” of God with Mary, for the Mass, the actual act of worship in the Catholic tradition, remained fixed and focused on the worship of God the Blessed Trinity. Second, the fact that the prayer is recorded by the biographer (and not simply called the “Hail Mary”) suggests it was not yet well known in Albert’s day. Third, this was the whole of the “Hail Mary” in Albert’s day. Fourth, the second part of the prayer (“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”) did not stand as it does now until roughly the 16th Century. Fifth, all this points quite clearly to the fact that the Hail Mary is something that developed out of the hearts and minds of Christians meditating on the life of Jesus’ greatest disciple as it is revealed in scripture and in the Tradition of the Church.
This is fitting, because the Hail Mary is profoundly the prayer of a disciple. Like the Rosary of which it forms such a vital part, it is a prayer ordered toward looking at Jesus through the magnifying lens of Mary’s life. But it is also a prayer that teaches us to see Mary as the greatest recipient of grace as well as our model and Mother in how to live out that life of grace in our day to day walk with Christ. It is a prayer that strings together the basic biblical teaching about Mary and quotes freely from 1) Luke’s infancy narrative; 2) the Council of Ephesus, which declared Mary to be the “Mother of God”; and, 3) the cry of the Catholic heart that she stand by our cross of death as she stood by Christ’s. She is the disciple who sticks with us in our wretchedness when all others have forsaken us, just as she stuck by Jesus. What it is not is a prayer that Mary take the place of God. The whole point about Mary is not that she as a goddess who stoops down to us and “empties herself” as Jesus did, but rather that she, being a mere mortal, is exalted by the grace of God to sit in the heavenlies with the Son of God.
In all this, Mary mirrors the faithfulness of God to us and teaches us to mirror that faithfulness to God and our neighbor. There is a profound sanity in this which is exactly the sanity of the gospel—the sanity of love. For the whole nature of covenant is that it is about family. God has not willed to save us by ourselves alone, but to save us through the mediation of our fellow human beings with the Son of Man as chief Mediator and his Mother the Mediatrix of All Grace. How can we address her by this audacious title? Because her Son is All Grace and it is through her freely given “Yes” that God chose to send his Son into the world.
In the same way, we are made cooperators and co-laborers with Christ and become mediators of grace to our neighbor. Our relationship with God in Christ necessarily involves us in a relationship with his Body the Church, of whom Mary is Mother since she is the mother of “the rest of her offspring, …those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus” (Revelation 12:17). God has chosen to reveal himself, not via a direct encounter with his unveiled glory that would blast us to atoms (cf. Exodus 33:22), but in a human way, through human things like bread, wine, and water and via the human touch of a brother, a sister, a father—and a Mother. Mary stands as the great sign of this sacramental truth by being, as St. Ambrose reminded us, the type of the Church.[2] When we see Mary, we see an icon of the entire Church, perfected in the image of Christ, docile to his will, mighty with his power, gentle with his love, terrible as an army with banners. If we seek to be perfect disciples, we must look to the saints in whom the Spirit dwells just as Paul told us to do when he said, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). The greatest disciple of them all is Mary, whose soul magnifies the Lord and (like all magnifiers) makes it easier for us to see him.
The Tradition of the Church has given such prominence to these two prayers because they are so profoundly expressive of the Church’s heart and soul. To learn and understand the Our Father and the Hail Mary is to learn the deepest contours of the Church’s interior life, for both are prayers that come from the Holy Spirit, who is the soul of the Church. Understanding this, let us then turn to these two jewels of the Church’s deep tradition of prayer and hold them up to the light in order to see their facets, asking the Holy Spirit to draw us more deeply into the heart of the mystery of God’s love for us.
[1] Cited in “The Rosary” entry in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia. Available on-line at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13184b.htm as of March 3, 2011.
[2] Ambrose, Expos. Lc. II, 7: PL 15, 1555.
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