Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!

A story is told of an incident during a rehearsal of a play to be presented at Dublin's famed Abbey Theater. The play's script called for a gun to be fired for some reason; and when that happened, the female lead was to cry out, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" But when that happened in rehearsal, a nervous type in the theater's hierarchy decided that such an expletive might be offensive to some in the audience and ordered it deleted.

So, on opening night, the gun was fired without that prayerful shout. Whereupon, a member of the Irish audience in the front row cried out, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!"

I was reminded of that incident when watching the special 25th-anniversary program of TV's "60 Minutes." A reprise of the program's interview with Bill and Hillary Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign revealed a hitherto undisclosed occurrence that could have been seriously traumatic. A large bank of lights broke loose from its mooring and crashed down narrowly missing the heads of the interviewees. With that, Hillary Clinton was heard to cry out, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!"

This incident intrigued me because while I know that President Clinton had spent several years in a Catholic elementary school and four years as an undergraduate in Jesuit Georgetown University, I was unaware of any Catholic roots in Hillary Clinton's background. And "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" is indeed a Catholic prayer.

Not for a moment do I suggest that Protestants, Jews, Muslims, or even freethinkers pray less often or less fervently than Catholics. They may very well surpass Catholics in both fervor and frequency. (In recent years especially, the strict observance of prayer among Muslims has become widely familiar.) But I mean here only to call attention to the incredibly rich treasure of prayers that is available in a particular way to Catholics.

The prayer "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" is a case in point. It is the prayer of choice that Catholic children are often taught to murmur when they hear the siren of a passing ambulance, fire truck, or police car. And it is a spontaneous invocation when a person is confronted with any moment of tension. More profound, the last beautiful sentence of a simple couplet that many of us learned as children is "And may my last words be, 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.'"

Our Catholic treasury of prayers includes prayers that we share with all Christians and, in some instances, with all who believe in a transcendent God. When Muslims pray, "Allah, be praised!," they, in their own words, are praising God no differently than Protestants, Jews, and Catholics do when they praise God. All Christians share the prayer that Jesus gave us, the Lord's Prayer, and the frequently invoked doxology Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Yet, we Catholics are blessed with wonderfully rich prayers of our own, mostly to the Virgin Mary and the saints. The lovely words of the Hail Mary are not only prayed by millions in countless languages each day but also have inspired some of our greatest composers to set them to music in a number of "Ave Marias." (In fairness, the Hail Mary is not exclusively Catholic. Its principal verse, of course, is biblical; and the prayer itself is honored in the liturgies of others.)

Two other prayers to Mary, familiar to many if not most Catholics, are extraordinarily rich in both meaning and eloquence.

The first, the Memorare, is sometimes attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. It is basically a prayer of petition, but its theology is sound enough. The petitioner stands before Mary "sinful and sorrowful" and asks that she intercede with her Divine Son--perhaps as she did at the wedding feast at Cana. The prayer exudes confidence that never has it been known that a petitioner such as the one praying "has been left unaided." The word unaided is a modest one that in no way presumes a miraculous response or even one bringing instant gratification. The Memorare is a prayer both powerful and credible.

The second eloquent prayer to the Virgin Mary is the Salve Regina that begins "Hail, Holy Queen." Poetically it is an apostrophe, and if it does not rival Milton or Dryden in its elegance, it contains phrases of surpassing beauty. Saint Alphonsus Liguori is said to have been the author of the Salve Regina. If so, he must have been powerfully assisted by inspiration.

Phrases such as "poor, banished children of Eve" and "mourning and weeping in this valley of tears" are unforgettable--as in the prayer's peroration: "after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus."

And if I had never written anything else in my life, I would be content if I were the author of "Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope."