The Angelus Prayer: Full Text, When to Pray It, and the Latin

The full text is above. It is written for two voices, a leader (V.) and everyone else (R.), but it can just as well be prayed alone, saying both parts.

1. First versicle. V. The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. R. And she conceived of the Holy Spirit. Then one Hail Mary, the leader saying the first half and everyone the second (“Holy Mary, Mother of God…”).
2. Second versicle. V. Behold the handmaid of the Lord. R. Be it done unto me according to thy word. Hail Mary.
3. Third versicle. V. And the Word was made flesh. R. And dwelt among us. Hail Mary. Many bow or genuflect at these words.
4. Closing versicle. V. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God. R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
5. The prayer. “Let us pray. Pour forth, we beseech thee, O Lord…”, ending “Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.”
6. Glory Be. The Compendium of the Catechism ends the Angelus with a Glory Be; in many places it is said three times.

Every line of the Angelus is Scripture or close to it. The first two versicles follow the Annunciation in Luke 1:26–38, where the angel Gabriel greets Mary, “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28), and she answers, “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). The third is the heart of the prologue of John’s Gospel: “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

Three times a day: “at dawn, mid-day and at dusk”, in the words of the Church’s Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (n. 195). In practice that is usually 6 a.m., 12 noon and 6 p.m., the hours at which many church bells still ring for it. In places where the bells no longer ring, set an alarm, or pray it with the first thing you do in the morning, at lunch and at the end of the working day.

From Easter Sunday until Pentecost, the Angelus gives way to the Regina Caeli, “Queen of Heaven”. This goes back to a disposition of Pope Benedict XIV on April 2, 1742 (Directory on Popular Piety, n. 196). The antiphon itself is older, probably from the tenth or eleventh century, and joins the Incarnation (“he whom you merited to bear”) to the Resurrection (“has risen as he said”). This is the text in the Compendium of the Catechism, U.S. version:

The Angelus grew out of church bells, one hour at a time, and its history is better documented than most devotions’.

• Evening first. The oldest custom is saying Hail Marys at the evening bell. A provincial synod at Gran (Esztergom, in Hungary) ordered three Hail Marys at the bell in 1307, and Pope John XXII attached an indulgence to the practice in 1318 and 1327. By the first half of the fourteenth century it was general across Europe.
• Then morning. A chronicle of Parma mentions a morning bell in 1318, and in England Bishop John Stratford of Winchester enjoined it as early as 1324.
• Noon last. A midday bell was rung, on Fridays only, in Prague (1386) and Mainz (1423). On June 29, 1456, Pope Callixtus III, in the bull Cum his superioribus annis, ordered bells rung at midday in every church, with the Our Father and the Hail Mary, to pray for the Christian army defending Belgrade against the Ottoman siege. It is often said that the noon bell celebrates the victory at Belgrade on July 22, 1456; in fact the bull came first, as a call to prayer, and the victory three weeks later. King Louis XI of France commended the noon prayer in 1475.
• The words. The three versicles in their present form are found in a catechism printed at Venice in 1560, and the fuller form, with the closing prayer, is traced to the early seventeenth century.

As the Holy See prints it in the appendix of the Compendium of the Catechism. The Hail Mary is said in full at each “Ave, María…”: Ave, María, grátia plena, Dóminus tecum. Benedícta tu in muliéribus, et benedíctus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta María, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatóribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostræ. Amen.

Because it stops the day three times to remember the one event on which all the others depend: that God became man. The Directory on Popular Piety calls it the traditional way the faithful commemorate the Annunciation, and a recollection of the moment “the Word became flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary” (n. 195). Praying it at morning, noon and evening does for an ordinary day what the Liturgy of the Hours does for a monastery: it gives the hours a shape, and hands each part of the day to God.