Rosary
the Rosary is at the heart of devotion to Our Lady. There is a reason the Rosary has been called the spiritual weapon of our times by St. (Padre) Pio and others: it has proven to be effective time after time.
One of the unsung benefits of the Rosary and the rule is that is has helped the illiterate or those who had not been catechized in the Faith understand the central mysteries of the Faith.
The Rosary, then, as a devotion, helps keep heresy at bay. This is not surprising, given that Mary is known as Destroyer of Heresies. “The great power of the Rosary,” Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman said, “consists in the fact that it translates the Creed into Prayer. Of course, the Creed is already in a certain sense a prayer and a great act of homage towards God, but the Rosary brings us to meditate again on the great truth of His life and death, and brings this truth close to our hearts.” 159
“The rosary has been extolled as a ‘compendium of the entire Gospel’ and a meditation on the mysteries of the Lord’s life and salvific work seen through the eyes of his mother,” Mariologist Father Johann Roten has explained. “It is as if Mary were the narrator of the events mentioned, a narrator who was part of the story and still holds an active role in the ongoing event of salvation.”
A pilgrimage with Mary.
By setting aside time to pray it, we mentally leave the everyday, going from the profane in search of the sacred. By focusing on the mysteries of Christ’s life, we remember the Christian story. In that encounter, we are transformed through new graces, insights, or healing. At the end of the Rosary, we have been transformed—even if just in the slightest way—which then allows us to reenter the world to share what we have been given. 162
In chapter 1, we saw how a mystic can transform the world as a creative minority. Historian Arnold Toynbee’s exhaustive work reveals that mystics can leave the world through prayer and come back to transform it, often in incredible ways. This is precisely the same process we see in this idea of pilgrimage, even if it is just the short journey through the mysteries of the Rosary. 162
St. Louis de Montfort offered a different explanation for the Rosary’s efficacy—that of imitation. “Children copy their parents through watching them and talking to them,” the French saint explained, “and they learn their own language through hearing them speak. An apprentice learns his trade through watching his master at work; in the same way … the Holy Rosary can become like their divine Master if they reverently study and imitate the virtues of Jesus which are shown in the fifteen mysteries of his life.”13 By meditating on Christ’s virtues, Our Lady helps instruct us in those same patterns as we work out our salvation. 163
the Rosary isn’t just Mary’s gift, it is His Rosary too. It is about His life, His sacrifice, His suffering, and His desire to unite us with His Father. 191
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