A Novena to Our Lady
Tota pulchra es
Hail, Full of Grace
The Novena Prayer
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
Gabriel's announcement in Luke 1:26-38 is dated by the Church nine months before Christmas, on 25 March, a date that in the old Roman and English calendar was also once reckoned the first day of the calendar year, until 1752 in Britain.
Preserved
The Novena Prayer
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
The title Mother of God, Theotokos in Greek, was formally defended against challenge at the Council of Ephesus in 431, which ruled against a rival term, Christotokos, Mother of Christ, that would have separated Mary's motherhood from the divine nature of her son.
Be It Done
The Novena Prayer
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
Mary's self-description in Luke 1:38, handmaid of the Lord, translates the Greek doule, the ordinary word for a female slave or servant, the same low social station the Magnificat a few verses later says God has looked upon.
The Visitation
The Novena Prayer
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
The Visitation, Mary's journey to her relative Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-56), is the setting for the Magnificat, Mary's only extended speech recorded anywhere in Scripture, a canticle built largely out of quotations from the Old Testament.
She Kept All These Things
The Novena Prayer
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
The phrase kept all these things and pondered them in her heart appears twice in Luke, at the shepherds' visit (2:19) and after finding Jesus in the Temple (2:51), one of the only windows the Gospels give onto her interior response to events.
Do Whatever He Tells You
The Novena Prayer
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
At Cana, Mary speaks only five words to the servants in John's account, do whatever he tells you (John 2:5), traditionally read as her own summary of a spiritual life, addressed to everyone else in the story rather than to Jesus.
Standing
The Novena Prayer
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
John's Gospel names three other women standing with Mary at the cross (John 19:25); Matthew and Mark instead describe the women, including her, watching from a distance, a small but often-noted difference between the accounts.
In the Upper Room
The Novena Prayer
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
Acts 1:14 gives the last explicit mention of Mary anywhere in the New Testament, placing her in prayer with the apostles before Pentecost; nothing in Scripture records what became of her afterward.
Taken Up
The Novena Prayer
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven as dogma in 1950, in the apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus, the last of the four Marian dogmas to be formally defined, and one that deliberately left open the question of whether she died first.
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee is the invocation of the Miraculous Medal, 1830, and opens each day here. What follows each day is a fact about Mary drawn from Scripture or from the history of Marian doctrine, one per day. The prayers of the Rosary are set in their own order at the Rosary; see also the Hail Mary, the Memorare and the Salve Regina.
