Understanding Mary

Mark Shea on why the Angel Gabriel greets Mary with a salutation reserved for royalty.

A snippet:

Gabriel, for his part, does not greet her with the standard issue, "Fear not!" (a reasonable call, since she is not afraid of him). Instead, he says, "Hail!" Like "amen," "hail" is a distinctly premodern word. We use it as a joke when we pantomime our kowtows to politicians we find ridiculous and puffed up or when we cheer exaggeratedly for a sports star. We would regard somebody who used it in ordinary conversation as we would somebody who said "thou" or wore Shakespearean garb. That's because we live in a ruthlessly egalitarian age which has abandoned the snobbery and overt class consciousness of antiquity at the cost of its courtesy and courtliness.

Heaven preserves the courtesy without the snobbery. And so the angel Gabriel, a creature vastly superior to humans in the natural order, bows to a young peasant Jewish girl and speaks with the utmost reverence and courtesy in language reserved for greeting a monarch or Emperor. Normally, you said (if you were a Roman) "Hail, Caesar!" But Gabriel bows himself before a teenager in patched clothes from some ditchwater town in a forgotten backwater of Caesar's great empire and addresses her as royalty.