Hail, Holy Queen

The prayer opens by greeting Mary as Queen and Mother of mercy, then calls her our life, our sweetness, and our hope. Those titles caused trouble later, and they come back further down this page. Next the speakers name themselves. They are poor banished children of Eve, people living outside the garden. Genesis 3 ends with the man driven out of Eden, and cherubim and a flaming sword placed at the east of the garden to keep the way to the tree of life. The prayer is written from the far side of that sword.

The middle sentence is where most people slow down: to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. The Latin underneath reads gementes et flentes in hac lacrymarum valle, groaning and weeping in this valley of tears. The World English Bible has a place with nearly that name in Psalm 84:6: "Passing through the valley of Weeping, they make it a place of springs." The King James keeps the Hebrew place name, the valley of Baca. The psalm passes through that valley on the way to Zion, and so does the prayer.

Then comes the request, and it is narrower than people expect. Turn, then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us. An advocate is someone who speaks for you before a judge. The speakers ask Mary to look at them while the exile lasts, and after this our exile, to show them Jesus. Nothing in the text asks for the exile to be cut short. The phrase the blessed fruit of thy womb comes from Elizabeth's greeting in Luke 1:42, which the King James Version renders "blessed is the fruit of thy womb."

The prayer closes on three short cries: O clement, O pious, O sweet Virgin Mary. The 1888 book keeps close to the Latin pia with the English pious. The Latin word can carry either sense, and English translators split on it early. The 1910 Raccolta already has loving, only twenty two years after the Baltimore book chose pious, and loving is the word in both English versions of the Vatican's 2005 Compendium and in the 1982 ICEL translation.

In the Manual of Prayers the anthem is part of Evening Prayers, and it does not stand alone. A versicle and response come straight after it, the ones printed above: Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, answered by That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Then the leader says Let us pray, and a short collect follows.

The collect in the 1888 book reads: "Almighty, Everlasting God, who, by the co-operation of the Holy Ghost, didst prepare the body and soul of the glorious Virgin Mother, Mary, to become the fit habitation of Thy Son; grant that we who now rejoice in her commemoration may, by her gracious intercession, be delivered from all the evils that threaten us, and from everlasting death. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen."

The book closes the evening with one more versicle: May the divine assistance remain always with us. Then the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Creed are said inaudibly. That is the way the old Breviary ended Compline, scaled down for a family at home, and anyone can still follow it from the scanned page.

At the end of the Rosary the arrangement is similar with a different collect. The Vatican's 2005 Compendium of the Catechism lists the Hail Holy Queen as the prayer concluding the Rosary, then gives the same versicle and response, then a closing prayer asking that those who meditate on the mysteries may imitate what they contain.

Ask ten Catholics to write out the Hail Holy Queen and you will get several versions, all of them in current use. The differences are small and they fall along a timeline. The 1888 Manual of Prayers was prepared by order of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore and approved by the Archbishop of Baltimore on 17 May 1889. Its copyright notice names Clarence E. Woodman and the year 1888. Cornell University Library's copyright chart lists works first published in the United States before 1931 as public domain, which is why this page can print the text in full.

The 1910 English Raccolta, the official collection of indulgenced prayers, already reads differently. It adds a second greeting, Hail our Life, our Sweetness, and our Hope, which matches the Latin, where salve appears twice. It prints vale of tears where 1888 has valley, and it ends O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

The English appendix to the Vatican's 2005 Compendium prints two versions side by side, one marked for the United Kingdom and one for the United States. The UK version keeps thee and thine. The US version turns thee into you and thine eyes into your eyes, and then leaves thy womb exactly where it was. If your card mixes old and new pronouns in that way, it is following this text and nobody made a typo.

The fourth version carries real copyright weight. The International Committee on English in the Liturgy, known as ICEL, published its own translation in A Book of Prayers in 1982, with all rights reserved. It keeps the second hail. It drops poor banished, so the speakers are simply children of Eve. It swaps the valley of tears for a phrase about exile, and where the older text says after this our exile, it asks to be brought home. This page describes those changes and does not reproduce them. Loyola Press prints the ICEL text with its credit line.

None of these versions is wrong. They translate the same Latin, and the Latin grew too. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls the word Mater, mother, in the first line a late insertion of the sixteenth century. Virgo, in the last line, seems to date only from the thirteenth. Without Mater the opening greets Mary as Queen of mercy, the very words Luther would later single out.

Two legends tie Bernard of Clairvaux to the anthem, and Hugh T. Henry sets both out in the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia article. In one, Bernard entered the cathedral at Speyer on Christmas Eve 1146, while serving as papal legate in Germany, and genuflected three times as the procession sang O clemens, O pia, O dulcis. In the more common telling he added those three cries himself, on a sudden inspiration, and brass plates were later laid in the pavement to mark where he had stood.

Henry calls the legend very doubtful and gives his reasons. The story apparently originated in the sixteenth century while describing a moment in the twelfth. Bernard's contemporaries and travelling companions say nothing about it. The melody also suggests one author for the anthem and its closing words together.

The same article says the authorship is now generally ascribed to Hermann Contractus, Hermann the Lame, a monk of the island abbey of Reichenau on Lake Constance. A separate Catholic Encyclopedia entry describes him. He was born on 18 February 1013 and was disabled from birth, unable to move without help and able to read and write only with great effort. He still wrote a chronicle running from the birth of Christ to his own day, composed poems and hymns, and built astronomical and musical instruments. He died on 21 September 1054.

Other names have been proposed. The medieval liturgist Durandus, in his Rationale, credited Peter of Monsoro, bishop of Compostela, who died about the year 1000. The anthem has also been attributed to Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, the first to receive the cross from Pope Urban II for the crusade, and for that reason it was once called the Anthem of Le Puy. The encyclopedia records these claims and says the attribution to Hermann is now the general one. No source settles it, and a card that credits Bernard with the closing cries rests on a story Henry calls very doubtful.

The anthem spread through the monasteries first. Peter the Venerable ordered it sung in procession at Cluny on certain feasts around 1135. It reached the Cistercians in the middle of the twelfth century, and in 1218 their general chapter ordered it chanted in procession every day. The Dominicans began singing it at Compline, the last office of the day, around 1221. Before the middle of that century it entered the Franciscan breviary alongside the other Marian anthems, and from there it passed into the Roman Breviary.

The 1888 Manual places it in Evening Prayers under a rubric that limits it to part of the year, from First Vespers of Trinity Sunday to Advent. The Catholic Encyclopedia gives the same span for the Breviary, where it is the most celebrated of four Marian anthems that take turns through the seasons. That calendar governs the Office. The Compendium's instructions for the Rosary attach no season to the prayer at all, so the Rosary keeps it all year.

On 6 January 1884 Pope Leo XIII ordered it said after every Low Mass, together with other prayers. In their final form these Leonine Prayers were three Hail Marys, the Hail Holy Queen, the prayer O God our Refuge and Strength, the prayer to Saint Michael, and a threefold invocation of the Sacred Heart. Father Edward McNamara, in a 2018 ZENIT column that EWTN republishes, notes that they were abolished in 1964. The Rosary custom outlived them, and the end of the Rosary is where the prayer is most often said today.

The 1912 article adds that the anthem was especially dear to sailors, and that scholars give instances of the sailors of Columbus singing it. It also traces the evening Salve services of medieval guilds, called simply the Salve in England and Germany, as one root of the later service of Benediction.

The sharpest objection to this prayer is an old one. The 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia reports that Martin Luther complained the anthem was sung everywhere, with the great church bells rung in its honour, and that he objected especially to the words Queen of mercy, our life, our sweetness, our hope. Some Lutherans who did not want to lose the music rewrote it. A version in use at Erfurt in 1525 begins Salve Rex aeternae misericordiae, turning the greeting from a queen to a king of eternal mercy.

Catholic dissenters found the same line hard. The Jansenists, the encyclopedia says, tried to change it to the sweetness and hope of our life, so that the words would no longer call Mary herself our life.

Protestants who decline to pray the Salve usually point to two verses. 1 Timothy 2:5 reads, in the King James Version, "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." 1 John 2:1 gives the title advocate to Jesus: "we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." A Protestant reader sees that same title given to Mary, and the word hope attached to her, and declines to say it.

Catholic teaching answers with its own texts. Lumen Gentium, paragraph 62, from the Second Vatican Council, says Mary is invoked under the titles of Advocate, Auxiliatrix, Adjutrix and Mediatrix, and adds at once that this "neither takes away from nor adds anything to the dignity and efficaciousness of Christ the one Mediator." The Catechism, paragraph 970, says her influence "flows forth from the superabundance of the merits of Christ, rests on his mediation, depends entirely on it." On that reading the Salve is a request for prayer, addressed to someone Catholics hold to be alive in Christ.

Both sides read the same Bible and reach different conclusions, and this page will not settle it. No church authority has approved PrayWithJesus.ai, which has no standing to teach, and its assistant is software with no standing to rule on the question. If it matters to you, take it to a priest or a pastor in your own tradition, and read 1 Timothy 2 and John 19 with them.

Few set prayers are this frank about sorrow. The Hail Holy Queen describes its speakers as sighing, mourning and weeping, and places them in a valley named for tears. Its one request is to be seen while the sorrow lasts, and to be shown Jesus after it.

Scripture uses the same register. Psalm 137:1 reads, in the King James Version, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." Romans 8:23 reads "even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." The Latin of the Salve uses the same act, gementes, groaning. Someone praying it through grief is in old company.

If the valley you are in is deeper than a bad week, a prayer card is not enough by itself. Write down the name of your parish priest or pastor and the number of the parish office tonight, and call in the morning. Across the United States, calling or texting 988 reaches the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which never closes. In immediate danger, call 911. This site has no church approval, and its assistant cannot replace a person who can sit in the room with you.