Did You Know?

The Rosary is certainly the most popular “Marian devotion” in our Parish. If fact, we are known as “the Rosary church” from the Rosary relief around the walls of the church (and the Divine Mercy Chapel), which ‘ties’ the church together –ending at the main altarpiece with the Crucifix! One can actually walk and pray the Rosary around the church, touching the blue stone ‘beads’. It is not just the Legion of Mary and the Knights of Columbus, who promote Rosary devotion, but there are many “Rosary groups” which meet to pray the Rosary, daily and weekly! It is very easy to find a group with whom you can pray the Rosary, in Spanish as well as English. The Rosary is also prayed in Vietnamese and Korean before those monthly Masses! Sometimes, we hear the complaint that the Rosary is ‘repetitious’ and in some sense, it is. But so is breathing! And it is no less vital! When we pray the Rosary, in a quiet, unhurried way, (like deep breathing), we are allowing the Holy Spirit to ‘breath’ through us – in and through our prayer! When we take a few moments to consider the Mysteries of our Lord’s life and how the ‘mysteries’ of our own lives and the lives of those we love are caught up in the simply human but profoundly meaningful events of birth, suffering, learning, growing, maturing, visiting, praising, accompanying, dying. . .all of which are shared fully by our Lord in His Sacred Humanity. Pope St. John Paul II said that if we do not reflect on the Mysteries of the life of JESUS we ‘loose the key to the mysteries of our own lives.’ Some use the Rosary as a powerful intercessory prayer, pausing on the Holy Name of JESUS in the Hail Mary and allow the Holy Spirit to bring someone to mind – and then praying for that person(s) with the concluding words: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for US sinners, now and at the hour of OUR death.” An older Priest was asked by the Bishop of Eichstaett, Cardinal Josef Schroeffer, “I have heard that every day you pray 15 decades of the Rosary, is that so?” The old Priest smiled and said, “My health still permits me to do so, yes. In the quiet passage of the day of a retired person it is very good and very profitable to frequently include a decade of the Rosary.” The ordinary day of this old man could hardly be called ‘quiet.’ He used to say that in his old age, he was given a ‘job’ but he, nevertheless, continued to pray 15 decades of the Rosary each day. The old man was Saint Pope John XXIII.

PRAY THE ROSARY IN MAY – and get your ‘spiritual breath’!