Praying the Rosary

The medical and scientific communities have recently proclaimed what Catholics have known for centuries — reciting the Rosary is good for you.

However, the medical experts missed the raison d'être for the origin of the Rosary when they hypothesized it was developed by man to give those praying a sense of well-being as a result of their slowed cardiovascular rhythms.

Not quite, O men of modern science; but, nice try.

In truth, Heaven was the originator of the Rosary. The Blessed Virgin, in the 13th century, gave the Rosary to St. Dominic. Because belief of this Sacred Tradition requires faith, it is much easier to reason that man, for health reasons, devised the Rosary.

The above modern hypothesis is not entirely in the wrong, for there are a great number of benefits (graces) received by reciting the Rosary, both of the body and of the soul.

Praying the Rosary does bring us peace when prayed well and it consequently does slow down the cardiovascular rhythms of our body. More importantly, it gives us a more perfect knowledge of Christ. How does it do this?

The Rosary is 'a Christocentric prayer. It has all the depth of the Gospel message in its entirety.

The Rosary is the perfect compliment to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It sustains and echoes our sacramental life. The Rosary is a 'path to contemplation' — a path that Pope John Paul II said he follows daily, realizing each day's work within the mysteries of the Rosary.

Moreover, the Rosary purifies our souls, gives us victory over our enemies, allows us to practice virtue, sends us graces and merits, and allows us to help pay our debts against our temporal punishment.

The Rosary is also a prayer for peace in our families and in our world. What better time than in this era to pray the family Rosary, as Fr. Patrick Peyton instructed. He said, "The family that prays together, stays together."

Pope Leo XIII, often called "the Pope of the Rosary," strived to maintain the tradition of this prayer, which he asserted was a strong spiritual weapon against evil.

In addition, Sacred Tradition tells that The Fifteen Promises of the Virgin Mary (to those who recite the Rosary) was revealed in a message to St. Dominic and Blessed Alan 1208 A.D.

Our world owes a great debt of gratitude, perhaps more than our human minds can understand, to the holy St. Dominic. It is impossible to talk about the Rosary without significant mention of St. Dominic. Sacred Tradition and thirteen recent Popes tell us that Mary first revealed the Rosary devotion to St. Dominic.

Having received a vision of the Blessed Mother, Dominic began to spread the prayer of the Rosary in his missionary work among the Albigensians, a neo-Manichaean group of fanatical heretics. Albigenses believed that everything material was evil and everything spiritual was good. St. Dominic used the Rosary to convert the heretical Albigensians.

The Rosary was most strongly supported by the tradition of the Dominican Order. Pope Leo XIII affirmed over and over the Dominican origin of the Rosary and in a letter to the Bishop of Carcassone (1889), he accepts the tradition of Prouille, France, as the place where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St. Dominic, revealing the devotion to the Rosary.

Pope Alexander VI in 1495, addressed St. Dominic as "the renowned preacher long ago of the Confraternity of the Rosary, and through his merits, the whole world was preserved from universal ruin."

During an interview that Pope John Paul II gave in Germany during 1980 he held up his Rosary and said:

"This is the remedy that should be used in the struggle against evil. Pray the Rosary daily."

Mindful of the action of Pope Pius V in the Battle of Lepanto, Pope John Paul II, said in his Angelus address of October 1983:

"It is not a question now of asking for great victories, as at Lepanto and Vienna, rather it is a question of asking Mary to provide us with valorous fighters against the spirit of error and evil, with the arms of the Gospel, that is, the Cross and God's Word. The Rosary prayer is man's prayer for man."

On 16 October, 2002 the Pope John Paul II began the twenty-fifth year of his service as Successor of Peter. He chose to celebrate his anniversary — the fifth longest Pontificate in history — by writing an Apostolic Letter: Rosarium Virginis Mariae, The Rosary of the Virgin Mary.

In one of the most beautiful of his documents Pope John Paul announces the Year of the Rosary — October 2002 — October 2003. He urges us to rediscover the Rosary: to 'contemplate with Mary the face of Christ.'

Those who pray the Rosary regularly would do well to be enrolled in the Dominican Archconfraternity's Spiritual Rosary Confraternity.

As Pope Leo XIII said in his encyclical on the Confraternity, "whenever a person fulfills his obligation of reciting the Rosary according to the rule of the Confraternity, he includes in his intentions all its members, and they in turn render him the same service many times over."

A plenary indulgence is granted if the Rosary is recited in a church, or public oratory or in a family group, a religious community or pious association; a partial indulgence is granted in other circumstances."

Carry your Rosary upon your person whenever possible. The popular devotion is the most powerful prayer outside of the Holy Mass. Do not miss one day without it.

WRITTEN by Barbara Kralis and published by RenewAmerica.us on September 18th, 2004 and viewable by clicking on the title of this post.

What Did She Know?

Driving in to work this morning, my wife and I heard the Christmas song "Mary Did You Know?" playing on the radio. In the version that we heard, Kenny Rogers is asking if she knew that the child she was carrying would do many wondrous things. He asks if she knows that he will 'one day walk on water', 'save our sons and daughters', 'give sight to a blind man', 'calm a storm with his hand', and 'one day rule the nations' among other miraculous actions. It is a legitimate question to consider: what did Mary know about her child, and when did she know it? We know from Matthew's Gospel that Mary was visited by the angel Gabriel and given certain information. First, she was told that her child would be a boy, and that she should name him 'Jesus'. She is told by Gabriel that the child will be 'great' and will be 'called Son of the most High'. But then Gabriel goes further, saying 'the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father; and he shall reign in the house of Jacob forever. And of his kingdom there shall be no end.' What Gabriel is telling Mary is that her child shall be the long awaited Messiah. Mary doesn't understand how this can happen, since she is engaged to Joseph but not yet married, and she has never been with, nor does she intend to be with, a man in any physical way that would result in the birth of a child. In other words, Mary is a virgin, and she is staying that way until marriage. Gabriel then drops the final bomb on her: 'The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee...the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.' Mary is told that God Himself shall be the father of her child through supernatural means. Now you try to tell me that this wouldn't be a little overwhelming for your basic average teenage girl. But Mary was not average, she had been chosen by God in his plan for this purpose long before her own Immaculate Conception. So she knew before she had even conceived Jesus that she would be the mother of the Son of God, the Redeemer, the Messiah promised for ages. Later her fiancee, Joseph, was also visited, told of the supernatural conception, that the child would be a boy, and that they should name him Jesus. Joseph was told that this name would be given because the child would go on to 'save his people from their sins.' So both Joseph and Mary had this information during the pregnancy. While newly pregnant, Mary finds out that her cousin Elizabeth is also pregnant, now six months along. What Mary apparently does not know is that Elizabeth's child will grow to be 'John the Baptist', who will begin to lay the groundwork for her own child's ministry. When they visit, Elizabeth tells Mary that she, Mary, is 'blessed among women' and is 'the mother of my Lord.' Finally, just after Jesus' birth, Mary's family is visited by shepherds who related their experiences of being told by angels that 'this day, is born to you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger.' These were the exact circumstances that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were in, and the shepherds were thus driven to their location. So Mary gets even more confirmation to her earlier messages, as if she needed it by this point. So we find that Mary knew before she was even pregnant that her child would be the Christ, the Saviour, the Son of God, and she received a number of confirmations to these facts during and after her pregnancy. As a Jewish woman whose father was a priest, Mary knew well the prophecies involving the Messiah, so she had to know that ultimately her child would die so that his people could live. In the end we are left with no other way to see things than that Mary knew pretty much everything that was going to happen right from that first visit from Gabriel. We are man, and Mary was blessed, but she was also mortal. In other words, she could have seen and been overwhelmed by all of this and simply said "No." Instead, because Mary saw, knew, and accepted, and said "Yes", our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was born, lived, taught, and died for our sins. Mary quite obviously, along with the help of her husband Joseph, raised Jesus to be a loving, strong, wise, good man. Of course, as God among us, this was inevitable, but the love that Jesus had for his mother showed that she quite obviously did a good job raising and loving him. In these last couple of days before Christmas it is nice to know that 2,000 years ago, Mary knew exactly what she was getting into with the child to whom she was about to give birth. And it is nice to know that she said that "Yes" to the pregnancy, to His birth.

The Assumption of Mary and Marie

This past Friday, August 15th, is celebrated each year as the Feast of the Assumption in the Catholic Church. 'The Assumption' represents 'the happy departure of Mary from this life', and 'the assumption of her body into Heaven'. The online New Advent encyclopedia further refers to it as "the principal feast of the Blessed Virgin." It is thus incredible to me, or maybe in retrospect not so much so, that this holy day coincides with the anniversary of my own mother's passing. My mom, Marie Therese Gilmore Veasey, passed away on August 15th, 1998, alone in her home on what was also a Friday in that year. I had the unpleasant, but perhaps fortunate, task of finding her. Unpleasant for obvious reasons. Fortunate in that I can't think of anyone that I would have rather walked in and found her that day. I was always close to my mom, and had lived with and helped take care of her throughout my twenties and into my thirties while she dealt with an often debilitating illness that had robbed her of much of her adult life. Still, my mom was able to enjoy the best things in life, both big and small. She was a huge church-goer at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church which was located directly across the street from her home in South Philly. She loved her mystery dramas on TV, such as 'Murder, She Wrote' and 'Matlock', and the woman was a nicotine and caffeine fiend. I don't know if I ever knew someone who both smoked and drank coffee as much as she did. She also was able to overcome her illness much of the time, especially in her last years, as medications got more advanced and effective. She was able to not only attend, but dance at the wedding of Deb and I three years before her passing. Though I was initially incredibly saddened by her passing, I realize now that she is with the Lord, and freed from the shackles of that earthly illness. She would have absolutely loved her great-grandchildren, Elysia and Reznor, and would have loved hanging out with us in our backyard on Larkspur Street, but she never got to experience any of that. Perhaps that is our loss more than hers, because she most assuredly is watching down on all of it from her place in Heaven. In that place, she has also most assuredly been in the presence of the Virgin Mother with whom she shares the anniversary of their earthly passing. Mary loved her son, Jesus Christ, without reservation. As a child, she scolded him when she needed to, as a young man she supported him no matter her reservations, and until the day he died and beyond that she had faith in him unconditionally. I never felt anything less from my own mom. When life left me at times beaten, bloodied, and scarred, my mom was always, always there with a warm smile and a genuine hug of encouragement. Mary died in the presence of all of Christ's apostles, and was laid in a tomb much like her son. But when that tomb was later opened, Mary's body was gone, and the apostles rightly concluded that the body had been taken up to Heaven. Mary was not only the mother of Jesus Christ, the very human direct link to God, but a mother to all of us. As with all of my blog stories, the title is a link to more information, and you can learn much more about Mary by clicking there. While it may seem to some as a sad day not worthy of celebration, I disagree, and feel that the anniversary of Mary, and my own mom Marie, leaving this earth is also the celebration of their arrival in Heaven. Now that is something to truly celebrate.