We normally think of the Lord’s Prayer as the prayer received from God, but the Hail Mary is another such prayer. The difference is that the Lord’s Prayer was received from God: from Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself; whereas the Hail Mary was received indirectly from God: from the Angel Gabriel who brought the annunciation from the Most Holy Trinity, and from St. Elisabeth who blessed the Holy Virgin on the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The words of the Angel Gabriel began: Hail full of Grace the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women. The words of St. Elisabeth began: Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. She goes on to say: whence is this to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Comparing these salutations with our prayer we notice that in our prayer the names Jesus and Mary are added; that the blessing “blessed art thou amongst women” is (on the inspiration of God) repeated in the words of St. Elisabeth; that the words “Mother of my Lord” become in our prayer “Mother of God” (noting that the name Lord refers to God in the Bible).

As St. Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort remarks in his book The Secret of the Rosary, the Hail Mary is a prayer formulated by God announcing the Incarnation and hence giving unlimited glory to the Blessed Trinity, Our Blessed Lord and the Blessed Virgin. Let us now briefly look at the four parts of the prayer: the forms of address (‘Hail Mary’ and ‘Mother of God’), the Grace possessed by Our Lady, and the petition at the end of the prayer.

First then, the form of address “Hail Mary”. Saint Louis-Marie recounts a vision of St. Mechtilde in which Our Blessed Lady said: “My daughter, I want you to know that no-one can please me more than by saying the salutation which the Most Adorable Trinity sent to me and by which He raised me to the dignity of Mother of God.” There follows an interpretation of the salutation of which we shall repeat only the beginning. “By the words Ave (which is the name Eve, Eva), I learned that in His infinite power God has preserved me from all sin and its attendant misery which the first woman had been subject to. The name Mary which means ‘Lady of Light’ shows that God has filled me with wisdom and light like a shining star, to light up heaven and earth…”

Let us proceed to look briefly at the title Mother of God. Already contained in the address of St. Elisabeth, this title was proclaimed dogmatically in the Council of Ephesus in the year 430. This Council condemned the heresy of Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople. The Nestorian heresy teaches that the two natures of Christ, the Divine and the human nature, belong to two persons, a Divine and a human person united in Christ: the Blessed Virgin is the Mother only of the human person. The truth by contrast is that the two natures of Christ, the divine and the human natures, belong to one person who is the Divine Person, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Son. Since the Blessed Virgin is the Mother of this Divine Person, she is truly the Mother of God.

Now a word about the fullness of Grace that the Blessed Virgin Mary possesses. This fullness of Grace derives from the fact that she is the Mother of God: She is full of Grace because the Lord is with her; she is blessed amongst women because the fruit of her womb is blessed. St. Thomas explains that she possesses the fullness of Grace because she is in the closest proximity to the source of Grace, Who is Christ. This fullness of Grace therefore exceeds the degree of Grace of the highest angels and saints, so that the Blessed Virgin may indeed be compared to a shining star that illuminates heaven and earth.We conclude with the interpretation of St. Louis-Marie de Montfort of the petition at the end of the prayer: ‘Pray for us now during this short life so fraught with sorrow and uncertainty, pray for us now – now because we can be sure of nothing except of the present moment. Pray for us now that we are being attacked night and day by powerful and ruthless enemies. Pray for us now and at the hour of our death: so terrible and full of danger when our strength is waning and our spirits are sinking, and our souls and bodies are worn out with fever and pain. Pray for us, then, at the hour of our death when the devil is working his hardest to enslave us and to cast us into perdition. Pray for us at the turning point when the die will be cast once and for all and our lot forever and ever will be Heaven or Hell… Intercede for us and ask thy Son to forgive us and let us into the ranks of the blessed, thy elect, in the realm of everlasting glory.’ Amen.

In order to understand how the devotion of the Rosary developed, one must look above all to another, much older form of piety: the recitation of the psalms. Since the very beginnings of Christianity the psalter has enjoyed the primary place as form of prayer, both collective and personal. Composed of 150 psalms, the psalter is divided - probably by Origen (d. 254 A.D.) - into three equal parts of 50 psalms each. This division was in reference to the Holy Trinity, according to St. Hilary of Potiers, commenting a hundred years later (d. 367 A.D.). This distribution of the psalms, even if not used for the recitation of the Divine Office, continues to be used in various ways. We see, for example, in religious orders that upon the death of a fryar, while the priests offered the Sacrifice of the Mass, the lay brothers recited 50 psalms for their deceased brother.
150 psalms, three groups of 50: this is the distant origin of the Rosary - 150 Ave Marias, 5 "decades" in each of the mysteries.

The change from reciting psalms to repeating a single prayer occurred sometime afterwards when the lay brothers, lacking instruction, had need of more simple forms of prayer. Some recommended they recite a single verse 2606 times (the total number of verses in all 150 psalms), recite the same psalm 150 times, or again, substitute an Our Father for each psalm.
In the 12th and 13th centuries Marian piety grew together with the Ave Maria, considered now as one of the prayers to be learned by heart. At that time the Ave consisted of the two angelic salutations of St. Gabriel and St. Elisabeth, the name of Jesus being attributed to Pope Urban IV around the year 1263.

Thanks to the influence of the Cistercians who made it popular, the Ave Maria became a repeated invocation added or even substituted for the Our Father. By analogy with the psalter, the Ave Maria began to be recited in groups of 50 and, in order to avoid the danger of a purely mechanical recitation, the prayer was enriched with Marian antiphons in the same way as the psalms.

The Rosary became, therefore, "Our Lady’s Psalter", sometimes called a "chaplet" (chapeau, French for hat) in reference to the crown of flowers offered to images of the Blessed Virgin.

The framework of the rosary was thus constituted and it was on this framework that the meditation of the salvific work of Christ would develop.
The life of Jesus, of course, was the subject of contemplation long before the institution of the Rosary: already in the 3rd century Tertullien and St. Cyprien linked the hours of the Divine Office to the memory of the different moments of Christ’s Passion. In the middle ages this practice grew more complete. The sermons of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153 A.D.) on the Canticle of Canticles provided the basis for a meditation on the life of Jesus, the Annunciation, and the apparition of the Risen Saviour to St. Madeleine. But it was St. Aldred of Rielvaux (d. 1167 A.D.), in his Life of a Recluse, who was the first to put into practice a systematic meditation, prefiguring the method of the Carthusian, St. Rudolph of Saxony, and that of St. Ignatius of Loyola. In this context, the Ave Maria - which concluded at this time with praise of the fruit of the Mary’s womb - lent itself to meditation on the life of the Son of God, made flesh and born of the Virgin.

According to what we now know, it was towards the year 1300 that a series of Ave Marias was recited systematically with a meditation on the fruits of the Incarnation. This happened in the Cistercian monastery of St. Thomas-on-Kyll, in the region of Trier. The Marian prayer was recited a hundred times, each time followed by a phrase intended to aid in contemplating a redemptive work of Christ: "Hail Mary...and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus, …because he has created us in His image and likeness...because He chose you from all eternity to be his mother...."

A century later, Dominic of Prussia (d. 1460 A.D.) of the Saint Alban Carthusian monastery of Trier, affirmed in his biography that he was the first to add the subjects of meditation during recitation of the Rosary. It is he at least who had the idea to systematically link the recitation of the Rosary with contemplation of the life of Christ, dividing the prayer into 50 groups and editing a short text intended to follow each Ave Maria. He extended this method to the entire Marian psalter and composed three series of 50 phrases on the infancy, public life and Passion of Our Lord. The double principle of the Rosary, both Marial and Christocentric, was thus achieved.

In the 14th century and during the centuries that followed, the Rosary underwent various additions and modifications, touching more the form than the principle itself of this prayer.
The division of the Rosary into 10 "decades", each separated by the recitation of an Our Father, was the contribution of a Carthusian from Cologne, Henry Egher of Kalkar (d. 1408 A.D.).

Confraternities of the Rosary began to appear at the end of the 15th century, of which the first was founded in Cologne in 1475. This became the means for the Dominicans to spread the Rosary throughout all of Christianity. At the same time, the many meditations of the life of Christ - or "mysteries" - were fixed at 15, divided into the joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries.

Under the influence of popular piety, the text of the Ave Maria was enlarged and transformed into a prayer of supplication. It was in the time of St. Peter Canisius (1521-1597) that the invocation "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners" gradually spread. We also find other additions: "now and at the hour of our death" (15th century). The Ave Maria took its definitive form with St. Pius V when he included it in the Breviary of 1568.
According to his missionary methods, St. Louis Marie Grignon de Monfort (1673-1716) preceded the recitation of the Rosary by the praying of a Credo, an Our Father and three Hail Marys.

On July 13th 1917, Our Lady, appearing at Fatima, requested that after each "decade" we pray "Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell; lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy."

Finally, after announcing the beginning a Marian year from October 2002-2003, the current Holy Father proposed the addition of a fourth "decade" entirely centered on the public life of Jesus - the Luminous Mysteries : the baptism of Our Lord, the miracle at the Marriage of Cana, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, the Transfiguration and the institution of the Holy Eucharist.