How the Hail Mary Has Changed Over the Centuries

It developed differently in the East as well, which was pointed out in my post last night, but still based on the Gospel accounts of the Annunciation and Visitation.

From Aleteia

By Philip Kosloski

The Hail Mary prayer has developed over time and was not always prayed in the same way that it is prayed currently in the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church has two prayers that have become staples in the lives of Catholics around the world. These two prayers are taught to children from the earliest age and remain part of their spiritual lives until they die.

Those two prayers are the Our Father and the Hail Mary.

While the Our Father, given us by Jesus, has not changed much over the past 2,000 years, the Hail Mary, on the other hand, has developed and changed.

The prayer started small, and has since expanded to what we know today.

Two Bible verses

In the Gospel of Luke, we find the two principal verses that make up the frequently used “Hail Mary” prayer. The first part of the prayer is derived from the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel greeted Mary by saying, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:28)

The next part of the prayer is taken from the Visitation, when Elizabeth greeted Mary with the words, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (Luke 1:42)

Christians did not put the two verses together until, at the earliest, the 11th century. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains that “in point of fact, there is little or no trace of the Hail Mary as an accepted devotional formula before about 1050. All the evidence suggests that it took its rise from certain versicles and responsories occurring in the Little Office or Cursus of the Blessed Virgin, which just at that time was coming into favor 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.”

At first the prayer was known as the Salutation of the Blessed Virgin, and consisted only of the two verses joined together.

Pray for us sinners 

It was not until much later that the second petitionary half of the prayer (the "Holy Mary" part) was added. For several centuries the prayer simply ended at “…blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Amen,” but sometimes included petitions that were added on.

There are some groups who still maintain this tradition, adding various petitions or verses after the first part of the Hail Mary, often focusing on the mystery of the Rosary being said.

The official prayer of the “Ave Maria” (as we know it today) was not finalized until after the publication of the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the prayer was then included in the Roman Breviary of 1568. In the Catechism of Trent the prayer is mentioned, still referred to as the “Angelical Salutation.”

The Hail Mary is a prayer that has grown organically through the centuries and has become a primary staple of Catholic spirituality.