Did you ever stop to consider what the power of one Hail Mary can do? John Petrovich and Father Joe Freedy of Divine Mercy Parish in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, can tell you, because they witnessed it firsthand.
As reported by Joseph Pronechen in the National Catholic Register, Petrovich was on his usual Saturday morning run through a Pittsburgh neighborhood when he passed a house with an ambulance parked in the driveway. The front door and garage doors were wide open.
Growing up, Petrovich had been taught to make the Sign of the Cross and say a prayer whenever he saw or heard an ambulance or police siren. That habit was second nature to him. But on this particular morning, something was different. “I always said that prayer but never felt compelled to say a particular prayer,” Petrovich told the Register. “That was the one thing that was different than anything else. And the first prayer that came to mind was the Hail Mary.”
He considered stopping to help, but since he had no first-aid training, he decided to keep running. Still, he made a quiet bargain with God: if the ambulance was still parked in that driveway when he ran back, he would stop and see if he could assist. On his return trip, the ambulance was gone. The house was dark. The garage door and the front door were shut.
The following Thursday, Petrovich was running through the same neighborhood. As he approached the house where he had seen the ambulance, a woman standing at the edge of the driveway began waving her hand. “Stop. Please stop,” she called out.
Petrovich came to the edge of the driveway. “Thank you for stopping, sir,” she said. “I need to talk to you. I have to thank you because you saved my life.”
Puzzled, he asked how he could have saved her life.
She then told him what had happened to her the previous Saturday. She had been alone at home when she suddenly began feeling strange and blacked out. She knew she was dying. Before regaining consciousness in a hospital bed, she received a vision of Jesus, who came to her and said, “It’s okay. Everything is going to be fine. You’re going to be fine because this person prayed for you.”
Then she told Petrovich the detail that left him speechless: on the palm of the Lord’s hand was Petrovich’s face. She recognized him from the vision and had been waiting to find him. “I have to thank you for saving my life,” she said.
“And how do you react to something like that?” Petrovich told the Register. “I was speechless. I didn’t know what to say, except, ‘Thank you.'”
The Saints on the Power of the Hail Mary
The saints of the Catholic Church have long testified to the extraordinary power contained in even a single Hail Mary, prayed with sincerity and devotion.
In The Secret of the Rosary, St. Louis de Montfort highlights several holy men and women who understood the weight of this prayer. Among his examples, he recounts the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who once preached for forty consecutive days on the Hail Mary alone. St. Thomas taught: “In any peril you can obtain salvation from this glorious Virgin. Hence the Canticle of Canticles 4:4: ‘A thousand bucklers’ (that is, protection against dangers) ‘hang upon it.’ Again, in every work of virtue you will find her ready to help.”
Father Francisco Suarez, the great Jesuit theologian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was so aware of the value of the Angelic Salutation that he declared he would gladly give all his learning for the price of one Hail Mary well said.
In the thirteenth century, St. Mechtilde learned the highest praise we can give to Mary when Our Lady appeared to her with the Angelic Salutation written in letters of gold upon her breast. Our Lady told her: “My daughter, I want you to know that no one can please me more than by saying the greeting which the most adorable Trinity presented to me and by which I was raised to the dignity of the Mother of God.”
As St. Louis de Montfort himself counseled: “A single Hail Mary said properly is worth more than 150 said badly.”
How This Story Strengthens Faith
The effects of that one Hail Mary in Pittsburgh extended far beyond one man and one woman. Father Joe Freedy, senior parochial vicar at Divine Mercy Parish and president of Dry Bones Ministries, described the impact the story had on his own faith.
“That story has struck me and others so much,” Father Freedy told the Register. “The Blessed Mother is actually listening, and God is answering our prayer. One of the things I love about the story is that John told me, as he was jogging, he didn’t fold his hands, didn’t kneel down, and that’s how attentive our Blessed Mother is and Our Lord is to us.” He recalled the teaching of St. Therese of Lisieux, who described prayer as simply turning one’s heart to God. “Prayer with full intention and with the heart is the way God wants us to pray.”
Father Freedy noted that such answered prayers increase the supernatural virtue of faith. “Our gift of faith increases, our conviction increases, we really pray from the heart, and our prayers become even more efficacious. It’s a really hopeful story.”
He also offered a gentle reminder: although God does not always answer prayers when we want or how we want, “No prayer, no sigh of the heart isn’t heard and acted upon by God.”
For Petrovich, the experience brought what he calls “a major change for me for all my prayers,” placing more emphasis on praying for others rather than focusing solely on his own needs. He now carries a rosary everywhere he goes and prays it regularly with his wife, Bethann.
“Many times, we have truly prayed for somebody yet never hear and never know how it gets answered,” Petrovich reflected. “This taught me, too, that not all prayers are answered quickly and in the way we want them. But God hears them and answers them. This case was answered in such a profound, dramatic way.”
The lesson at the heart of this story is one that every Catholic can take with them: if one Hail Mary, prayed from the heart while jogging down a street, carries that much power, imagine what the fifty Hail Marys of a full Rosary can accomplish.
As Petrovich himself concluded: “The quickest and shortest way to Jesus is through the Blessed Mother.”
This story was originally reported by Joseph Pronechen and published in the National Catholic Register on March 28, 2023, and revisited in a follow-up piece on January 12, 2024.