Virgin Mary Praying

Description

This Icon is a copy of the Hagiography (Holy Card Printing) that we have made in our Laboratory and we reserve the exclusive rights to reproduce these images, which are protected by copyright.

The Hail Mary (Latin: Ave Maria) is a traditional Catholic prayer asking for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Roman Catholicism, the prayer forms the basis of the Rosary and the Angelus prayers. In the Oriental Orthodox Churches, Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches, a similar prayer is used in formal liturgies, both in Greek and in translations. It is also used by many other groups within the Catholic tradition of Christianity including Anglicans, Independent Catholics, and Old Catholics.

Largely based on two phrases in the Gospel of Luke, the prayer takes different forms in various traditions. It has often been set to music.

The prayer incorporates two greetings to Mary in Saint Luke’s Gospel: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”[1] and “Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” In mid-13th-century Western Europe the prayer consisted only of these words with the single addition of the name “Mary” after the word “Hail”, as is evident from the commentary of Saint Thomas Aquinas on the prayer.

The first of the two passages from Saint Luke’s Gospel is the greeting of the Angel Gabriel to Mary, originally written in Koine Greek. The opening word of greeting, χαῖρε, chaíre, here translated “Hail”, literally has the meaning “rejoice” or “be glad”. This was the normal greeting in the language in which Saint Luke’s Gospel is written and continues to be used in the same sense in Modern Greek. Accordingly, both “Hail” and “Rejoice” are valid English translations of the word (“Hail” reflecting the Latin translation, and “Rejoice” reflecting the original Greek).

The word κεχαριτωμένη, (kecharitōménē), here translated as “full of grace”, admits of various translations. Grammatically, the word is the feminine perfect passive participle of the verb χαριτόω, charitóō, which means “to show, or bestow with, grace” and here, in the passive voice, “to have grace shown, or bestowed upon, one”.

The text also appears in the account of the annunciation contained in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 9.

The second passage is taken from Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary in Luke 1:42, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” Taken together, these two passages are the two times Mary is greeted in the Chapter 1 of Luke.