Editorial

The month of the rosary

The Catholic Church has long observed October as the month of the rosary. If you haven’t included the rosary among your devotions, perhaps now would be a good time to start.

The rosary has been around since the late 12th century when laity began to pray 150 Hail Marys in imitation of the 150 psalms that monks chanted—and still do. St. Dominic and his followers popularized it in the 13th century, adding the meditations about the life of Jesus and Mary.

In the early 15th century, the Carthusian monk Dominic of Prussia divided the 150 Hail Marys into three sets of 50. He also began to call each of the 50 points of meditation a rosarium (rose garden) because the rose was a symbol of joy and Mary was “the cause of our joy” for bearing Christ. Thus the name “rosary” became the name for the devotion.

Another 15th-century Carthusian monk, Henry of Kalkar, then divided the 50 Hail Marys into decades with an Our Father between each.

In 1483, a Dominican priest wrote a book on the rosary called Our Dear Lady’s Psalter. It listed the same 15 mysteries that we meditated on through the 20th century, except that the fourth glorious mystery combined Mary’s assumption and coronation and the fifth glorious mystery was the Last Judgment.

For most of the past 500 years, then, there were 15 official mysteries: five joyful, which concern the beginning of our redemption (the annunciation, the visitation, the nativity of Jesus, the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, and finding the child Jesus in the Temple); five sorrowful, which pertain to Christ’s passion (the agony in the garden, the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the carrying of the cross, and the crucifixion); and the glorious (the resurrection, the ascension, the descent of the Holy Spirit, the assumption and the coronation of Mary).

A change in the mysteries was made at the beginning of this century, in 2002, when St. Pope John Paul II, recognizing the obvious gap between the finding of Jesus in the Temple when he was 12 and his passion and death, added the five luminous mysteries, or mysteries of light, recalling events in Jesus’ public ministry (his baptism, the wedding feast at Cana, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, the transfiguration, and the institution of the Eucharist).

With those additions, the rosary really is what St. Pope Paul VI called it in his 1974 apostolic exhortation “Marialis Cultus”: “a compendium of the entire Gospel” (#110).

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the family rosary was a common practice among Catholic families, especially among the Irish. This devotion was especially promoted by Holy Cross Father Patrick Peyton, widely known as the “rosary priest.” He coined the adage “the family that prays together stays together,” and he led rosary crusades that attracted millions of people throughout the world in the 1950s.

Another Holy Cross priest, who helped Father Peyton get started when both were seminarians, was Father Theodore Hesburgh. As president of the University of Notre Dame, he had great devotion to the mother of God and made sure he said the rosary daily. In his later years, when macular degeneration prevented him from praying the Liturgy of the Hours, he substituted with three rosaries every day.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was another man known for his love of Mary and his devotion to the rosary. One of his books was The World’s First Love, an eloquent tribute to the Blessed Virgin and dedicated to “The Woman I Love.” As national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith (SPOF), he designed a World Mission Rosary, with different-colored beads for each of the five continents that Catholics prayed for and worked in. They were distributed to those who contributed to the SPOF. More than a quarter-million of them were mailed within a couple years.

This coming Monday, Oct. 7, the Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. It was established because on that date in 1571 a Christian fleet defeated a Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto while Pope St. Pius V and the people of Rome fasted and prayed the rosary.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

—John F. Fink