Hail, Holy Queen (Salve Regina): The Prayer in English and Latin

Two words were not there at first. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that Mater, in “Mother of Mercy”, is found in no early source and was inserted in the sixteenth century, and that Virgo, in the last line, dates only from the thirteenth. The oldest form greeted Mary simply as “Queen of mercy”. The Spanish, Dios te salve, Reina y Madre de misericordia, is on Dios te salve, Reina.

So “the response to the Hail, Holy Queen”, the thing people search for, is that versicle and response: the leader says “Pray for us, O holy Mother of God”, and everyone answers “That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.” Then the Sign of the Cross. The full sequence of the Rosary, bead by bead, is on how to pray the Rosary.

The Church attaches a partial indulgence to the Salve Regina said devoutly on its own, naming it among the approved Marian prayers alongside the Memorare and the Sub tuum praesidium (Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, concession 17).

Neither is more correct. Pray the one the people around you are praying, so that the words can be said together.

It is still there. The General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours ends Night Prayer this way: “Finally, one of the antiphons in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary is said. In the Easter season this will be the Regina caeli” (no. 92). In the older breviary the Salve was the antiphon from Trinity Sunday until Advent, the longest stretch of the year; today it may be chosen on any night outside Eastertide. The whole of Night Prayer, psalms and all, is on Compline, the Church’s night prayer.

For almost eighty years it was also said after every Low Mass. In 1884 Pope Leo XIII ordered three Hail Marys, the Hail, Holy Queen and a closing prayer to be said after Low Mass throughout the world, and in 1886 he added the prayer to St. Michael; the practice ended with the liturgical reform of the 1960s. That story is on the St. Michael prayer.

Traditionally attributed, not proven. Other medieval writers named Petrus of Monsoro, a bishop of Compostela who died about the year 1000, or Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, the first to take the cross for the First Crusade, who left for it in 1096. A later story says St. Bernard of Clairvaux added the closing cry, “O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary”, on entering Speyer Cathedral on Christmas Eve 1146; the Encyclopedia says the legend is “rendered very doubtful”, since the story first appears four centuries later and the melody suggests one author for the whole. What is certain is how quickly it spread: sung at Cluny in the 1130s, at Cîteaux in the twelfth century, and by the thirteenth across the whole Western Church. Confraternities sang it in the evening, and sailors at sea; Columbus’s crews are among those recorded singing it.

“Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us.” An advocate speaks for someone else. Mary’s role is intercession: “we can entrust all our cares and petitions to her: she prays for us” (CCC 2677).

“And after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” This is the point of the whole prayer. Every line before it is preparation for this request, which is Elizabeth’s greeting turned into a petition: “blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (Luke 1:42). We do not ask Mary to be our destination. We ask her to show us her Son.

“O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.” Three cries of affection at the end, the way the prayer began: a greeting to a mother. And the promise the response asks us to be worthy of goes back to the Cross, where Jesus gave her to the disciple he loved: “Behold, your mother!” (John 19:27).