The Hail Mary prayer is one of the central prayers in Roman Catholicism. It is an invocation in which Catholics express their devotion to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, and ask her to intercede on their behalf. The prayer is often assigned as penance when Catholics perform the sacrament of confession, and it is one of three principal prayers recited during the rosary, a Marian devotional practice involving a string of counting beads.
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