Not only that, it’s the central line of the piece. Don’t we all hope and pray that our lives bear good fruit, as Mary’s did? (In English, we race to the end of the line and no one really wants to be thinking about wombs anyway so let’s get to Jesus already.) As I prayed it repeatedly, fructus ventris started to conceptually morph into fructus vitae, the fruit of one’s life. With benedictus fructus ventris tui phrasally separated from Jesus, my attention rested more on fruit than it does in English. It struck me as the same kind of withness as Immanuel, God-with-us. It may simply be my unfamiliarity with the language, but somehow that phrase conveys much more of a sense of solidarity, of withness, than the English: in among the women instead of out of all women. What struck me in the next line was the phrase in mulieribus. A-ve ma-RI-a, GRA-ti-a PLE-na, DO-mi-nus TE-cum. The first thing I noticed is that the three-beat cadence of those first three phrases rhymes perfectly. Here’s how it reads in Latin, with line breaks again indicating the phrasing that is natural to me when I recite it. It gave me enough background in the language that the Latin texts I sang in choir are reasonably comprehensible to me, so I’m actually reading the Latin, not just sounding it out.

I had a couple of years of Latin in high school. So I’m starting to see this shape, here: downward (angel from God), parallel (Elizabeth to Mary), upward (soul to heaven).Īnd then I decided to start praying it in Latin. Her cousin Elizabeth, who was great with child in her old age as the angel had foretold, greeted her and said:īecause of the last phrase of the prayer, many Catholics say a Hail Mary when they hear a siren or see an ambulance and of course it is traditional to pray at the bedside of someone who is dying. Hail Mary, full of grace: the LORD is with you. The angel appeared to Mary, and said to her: It may not be until later that we learn to recognize the scriptural origin of the first half of the prayer. Most Catholic children learn this prayer when they are very young. The line breaks represent the typical phrasing when it is recited. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.Īnd blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Here’s the traditional text, as every English-speaking Catholic child learns it: The other night, I got to praying/playing around with the Hail Mary in both English and Latin, and found some interesting differences in shape.

What is the hail mary in latin