Catholic Commentary
Opening Acclamation: Praise of the God-Fearing Man
1Praise Yah! Blessed is the man who fears Yahweh, who delights greatly in his commandments.
Psalms 112:1 opens with "Hallelujah," a communal command to praise God using the intimate divine name Yah rather than the full YHWH. The imperative summons assembled Israel to acknowledge God's worthiness of adoration, establishing that praise is both a theological necessity and a collective act that precedes all other human response.
One word—Hallelujah—stops the human heart before it asks, before it worries, before it does anything but acknowledge that God is infinitely worthy of praise.
Catholic tradition has consistently treated the Psalms not merely as ancient Hebrew poetry but as the prayer of the whole Christ — totus Christus, head and members — a phrase drawn from St. Augustine's landmark Enarrationes in Psalmos. Augustine teaches that when we pray the Psalms, Christ prays in us and through us; the "Hallelujah" of Psalm 112 is therefore not simply our word but the Word made flesh lifting praise to the Father through our lips. This understanding is enshrined in the Church's Liturgy of the Hours, where this psalm appears as a song of praise precisely because the Church sees herself as the community addressed by that plural imperative.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2639) identifies the Hallelujah as "the word of the heavenly Jerusalem," noting that praise is "the form of prayer which most directly recognizes that God IS." It is, in Catholic understanding, the highest form of prayer — not because it asks for nothing, but because it most perfectly corresponds to reality: God is infinitely worthy, and to say so is the truest act of the human intellect and will.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on the Psalms, notes that praise (laus) directed to God engages both the intellect (acknowledging divine greatness) and the will (delighting in it), making it the perfection of the theological virtues of faith and love together. Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (§24), affirmed that the Psalms are "words of God expressed in human words," making this opening cry a participation in the divine life itself.
In an age saturated with complaint, cynicism, and performative grievance, the single-word command "Hallelujah" cuts against the cultural grain with radical force. For the contemporary Catholic, this verse is an invitation to resist what Pope Francis calls the "globalization of indifference" by beginning each day — each prayer, each gathering — with an act of deliberate, conscious praise. This is not naïve optimism; the psalmist praises in the context of a world where the wicked exist and darkness is real (cf. Ps 112:10). It is rather a disciplined reorientation of the soul.
Practically, Catholics can recover the power of this verse by taking the Mass's "Alleluia" before the Gospel not as a musical interlude but as a moment of genuine acclamation — pausing to mean the word. Similarly, reciting Morning Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, which incorporates these psalms daily, trains the Catholic imagination to begin every day as the psalmist does: with praise before petition, with worship before worry. The "Hallelujah" is a posture of the soul that, once cultivated, shapes every subsequent word and act.
Commentary
Verse 1a — "Praise Yah!" (הַלְלוּ־יָהּ, Hallelujah)
The opening word of Psalm 112 is the famous liturgical shout Hallelujah, a compound of the Hebrew imperative hallelu ("praise ye," second-person plural) and the divine name Yah, the shortened form of the Tetragrammaton YHWH. This is not merely a pious interjection — it is a theological command directed at a community. The plural imperative insists that praise is inherently communal, an act of assembled Israel, not solitary sentiment. The psalm thus begins not with description or petition but with doxology: the acknowledgment of God as worthy of adoration precedes every other human act.
Structurally, Psalm 112 is the twin of Psalm 111. Both are acrostic poems (each verse beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet), and the two form a diptych: Psalm 111 praises God's attributes directly, while Psalm 112 praises the attributes of the man who fears God. The Hallelujah that opens Psalm 112 thus carries resonance backward into Psalm 111 — it is the human response to the divine character just celebrated. God's righteousness (Ps 111:3) is mirrored in the just man's righteousness (Ps 112:3, 9); God's gracious compassion (Ps 111:4) finds its echo in the merciful man (Ps 112:4). The opening "Hallelujah" is therefore not simply a header but a hinge — it declares that the life of the righteous man is itself a form of praise.
The Hebrew Yah rather than the full YHWH is significant. This contracted form of the divine name appears frequently in songs and hymns (as in "Hallelu-jah," "Isaiah" [Yesha-yahu], and "Alleluia" in Greek and Latin). Its use preserves an archaic, intimate character, pointing to the passionate and personal nature of Israel's relationship with God. In praising Yah, the psalmist praises the God who rescued Israel from Egypt (Exod 15:2: "The Lord [Yah] is my strength and my song"), binding praise immediately to salvation history.
Literal sense: The verse summons the assembled community to praise the LORD — a call that flows into the body of the psalm, which then demonstrates why God is worthy of praise by describing the blessed life of the one who fears Him. The structure implies: "Praise the LORD — and here is what that praise looks like when it takes flesh in a human life."
Typological and spiritual senses: The Church Fathers recognized that the man described in this psalm — righteous, merciful, generous, unafraid — reaches its perfect fulfillment in Christ, who is the supremely God-fearing man (Heb 5:7: "He was heard because of his reverence"). The opening "Hallelujah," in its transfer to Christian liturgy, becomes an eschatological shout: in the book of Revelation (19:1–6), the heavenly multitude cries "Alleluia!" precisely at the consummation of salvation, suggesting that the psalmist's imperative finds its ultimate answering in the praise of the New Jerusalem. Every "Alleluia" sung at Mass thus participates in this cosmic arc from creation's praise to eternal doxology.