For when it is not all right, and you would rather not be told that it is. This one says out loud that we are a long way from home — poor banished children of Eve — and then asks his mother to turn and look this way.
Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
Salve ReginaSalve, Regina, Mater misericordiae, vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Hevae. Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle. Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte; et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exsilium ostende. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.
It opens by calling her two things at once — Queen, and Mother of Mercy — and holding both is most of the point. The highest place there is, and the one you would go to when you are frightened.
Then it stops describing her and starts telling the truth about us. Banished. Crying out. Sighing. Mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Nobody is pretending here, and that is why this prayer works on a bad night when a cheerful one will not.
What it asks for is smaller than you would expect. Not rescue, not a fix. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us. It asks her to look.
And then it goes straight past her, which is the part most people miss. Show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Every line has been walking toward that one. She is not where the prayer stops.
The last three phrases ask for nothing at all. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary. By then you are just talking to her.
The eleventh century. After that it gets uncertain, in a way worth knowing about.
It has been prayed as Hermann of Reichenau's for a very long time. He was born in 1013 and lived on an island monastery in Lake Constance, so severely disabled that he could not walk unaided and was hard to understand when he spoke; his own century called him Hermann the Lame. He was also a mathematician, an astronomer, a chronicler and a composer, and the brothers carried him from room to room so he could work. If the prayer is his, then poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears was written by someone who had every reason to mean it.
Other names have been attached — Adhemar of Le Puy, the bishop who went with the First Crusade, and Bernard of Clairvaux, usually credited with the last three invocations rather than the whole thing. None of the three can be proved, and honest editions have said so for a century. What is not in doubt is that the words are in the manuscripts by the eleven hundreds and have never once left.
Which is its own kind of answer. Nine hundred years of people finding it true is a different sort of evidence than a signature.
The Cistercians took it up and sang it every day. The Dominicans built a procession around it — after Compline the friars walked the dark cloister singing it, and eight centuries later they still sing it over their own dead at the graveside. Spanish and Portuguese crews sang it at sea in the evening, so it went aboard ship and crossed to the Americas that way.
Then in 1884 Leo XIII ordered it said at the end of every low Mass in the world, with three Hail Marys, and two years later added the prayer to St. Michael. So for eighty years, every Catholic anywhere who went to Mass stayed on their knees afterward and said this together, out loud. That stopped in 1964. If you are old enough, you heard it; if you are not, nobody ever mentioned it.
It is still there twice over. It is what the Rosary ends with. And it is still what the Church says at nightfall for half the year — see More info at the top for the other three and their seasons.