The Beauty of Our Catholic Heritage - The Hail Mary

Fr. Jacob Hsieh is a Norbertine priest of St. Michael’s Abbey teaching religion and Latin at Mary Star of the Sea High School in San Pedro and chant at Ss. Peter and Paul Church in Wilmington.  He is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College and was ordained a priest in 2015. 

In this episode, he reflects on the Catholic prayer the Hail Mary.

As always, thank you for listening!

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Transcript
Intro: 0:34

Welcome to the beauty of our Catholic heritage. Our host is father Jacob Shea, a Norbertine father of St. Michael's Abbey in Orange County, California. Father Shea has a great love for our church's heritage, the beauty of our Catholic heritage with father Jacob Shea

Fr. Jacob Hsieh: 0:54

Welcome back to the beauty of our Catholic heritage here with father Jacob Shea. Let's begin in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. St. Joseph, pray for us, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Today, Let's meditate on the beauty and the glory of the Hail Mary. This prayer is so powerful and said by so many Catholics in so many saints, we must really make sure that all children know this prayer, it is a very scary reality. There are many Catholic children who do not know the Hail Mary, or perhaps the glory be. And of course, a lot of Catholics don't even know the act of contrition. This is a very important thing to realize, in our modern day, that we rely so much on our iPhone, in order to look something up that we don't commit it to memory, we really lose this beautiful art of memorizing things. And memory is a gift that is given to us by God. And we really have to make sure that our memory is filled with beautiful memories. And we have to make sure that we practice using our memory and fill our memory with holy things. This is super important, because a lot of difficulty psychologically, is not being able to deal with memories in the past correctly, either becoming depressed or angry, or wanting revenge. So that's why we have to really practice using our memory, and really sanctify it by memorizing beautiful things. That's why we teach children prayers, and we teach them how to memorize prayers. And here, we see that when you really repeat something and make it part of yourself, that really changes you. Many times, we have an idea of memorizing something, which is just so painful, I but uh, memorize this for a test, I have to memorize this, you know, to pass this test, or I have to memorize this. So I can make this person happy at work or whatever it is you have to memorize. And you don't want to forget it so that you can accomplish this task. And we look upon this act of memorizing is so mechanical, and so boring. And just a chore that we have to do, I have to memorize these multiplication tables, or I have to memorize this, whatever it is, right? This problem in math so that I can vomit it out on the test, you know, all the students are trying to memorize all these different things. But this is not really the image of memory that we should have. When we memorize something, it becomes a part of us. And we lovingly practice it so that it becomes a part of our soul. Similarly, when we memorize prayers, it's not just some kind of mechanical robotic thing that we do in order to memorize a prayer. So if you don'