This is another backing from the recesses of my hard drive. When I started playing in a Catholic Church there were songs that were in the pores of everyone in the pews that I’d never heard and had to learn. This was one of them, although I haven’t heard it for a while.
1. Immaculate Mary, your praises we sing.
You reign now in heaven with Jesus our King.Refrain
Ave, Ave, Ave, Maria!
Ave, Ave, Maria!2. In heaven the blessed your glory proclaim;
On earth we your children invoke your fair name.3. We pray for our Mother, the Church upon earth,
And bless, Holy Mary, the land of our birth.
Hymnary tells me the tune is the Lourdes hymn, and the first stanza is by nineteenth century priest, Fr Jeremiah Cummings and the second to seventh are by the late Fr Brian Foley. Wikipedia says the Lourdes hymn is a traditional French tune and the words are by Abbe Gaignet. This is all very interesting but the lyrics I find on the net vary in content and number of verses so I have no idea who wrote what. Some have been updated to promote apparitions other than Lourdes.
This site has:
Immaculate, Mary!
Our hearts are on fire.
That title so wondrous
Fills all our desire!We pray for God’s glory,
May His Kingdom come.
We pray for His Vicar,
Our Father, and Rome.We pray for our Mother,
The Church upon earth.
And bless, sweetest Lady,
The land of our birth.
Three verses will do I suspect.
The sheet music is available here in the public domain, but I note many other links to different arrangements on the net.
In New Zealand, our first verse was
“Immaculate Mother, we call upon thee.
From this land of the south, from our isles of the sea”
The Irish are big into Lourdes, and have some interesting links with the French – the work of Irish missionaries is why a number of French tunes like this pop up in surprising places.
My guess is that no one really knows who wrote the very first version of this, but that lots of people have claimed that they wrote various adaptations.