From the
feast of the Solemnity of the Most H0y Rosary, which is attached to
the first Sunday of October, and from the special devotions first
appointed for all the days of this month by Pope Leo XIII, October
has come to be called and to be the Month of the Holy Rosary. In
Australia, where May is a winter month, October has been officially
promoted to the dignity of Mois de Marie. Less excuse than all this
is needed to justify me in associating October with certain very
informal notes about the Rosary, one of which dates as far back as
June 265 1874, when I made this brief extract, never utilised till
now, from the ninth chapter of "Grapes and Thorns," by Miss
Mary Agnes Tincker :—
"Father
Chevreuse took out his beads to exorcise troublesome thoughts and
invoke holy ones. It was a saying of his that the beads, when rightly
used, had always one end fastened to the girdle of Mary, and were a
flowery chain by which she led the soul directly to the throne of
God. They proved so to him in this case ; and one after another the
Joyful Mysteries were budding and blossoming under his touch, when
presently he found himself ''
I have no
idea how or where he found himself, for I have not the slightest
recollection of the story except that it was very good and very
clever. But I have not had time to forget another admirable story
which may be very earnestly recommended to convent libraries and
readers in general—"By What Authority" by Robert Hugh
Benson" son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, and now (thank
God) a Catholic priest. The mistaken notions about Rosary beads
entertained by persons outside the Church are well discussed at page
174. The heroine, Isabel Norris, " began to discover that for
the Catholic the Person of the Saviour was the very heart of religion
. . , and that the worship of the saints and of the Blessed Mother,
instead of distracting the Christian soul from the love of God,
rather seemed to augment it." She soon "began to understand
what the Rosary meant to Catholics. Mistress Corbett had told her
what was the actual use of the beads, and how the mysteries of
Christ's life and death were to be pondered over as the various
prayers were said.'' But she had still prejudices against what seemed
a mechanical and, indeed, superstitious method of praying. One day
she saw the beads in the hands of an old nun who in those troubled
days of Queen Elizabeth was obliged to live with her sister in her
house in the country. ''The old lady's eyes were half closed and her
lips just moving, and the beads passing slowly through her fingers."
After a while the good Protestant maiden asks her old friend, "How
can prayers said over and over again like that be any good ?"
Mistress Margaret was silent for a moment. 'I saw young Mrs. Martin
last week,' she said, ' with her little girl in her lap. Amy had her
arms round her mother's neck and was being rocked to and fro, and
every time she rocked she said O Mother I' 'But then,' said Isabel
after a moment's silence, 'she was only a child.' 'Except ye become
as little children,' quoted Mistress Margaret softly. 'You see, my
Isabel, we are nothing more than children with God and His Blessed
Mother. To say Hail Mary! Hail Mary! is the best way of telling her
how much we love her. And then this string of beads is like our
Lady's girdle, and her children love to finger it and whisper to her.
And then we have our Pater Nosters too; and, all the while we are
talking, she is showing us pictures of her dear Child, and we look at
all the great things He did for us, one by one; and then we turn the
page and begin again.' "
The American
lady, converted from Transcendentalism forty years ago, and the
English gentleman, converted from Anglicanism five or six years ago,
have both hit on the same idea that the Rosary is the Blessed
Virgin's girdle, and that we are her little children fingering it
fondly and therefore keeping very close to our Mother.
Not only
strangers outside the Church, but there are many within it who look
on the Rosary with its string of beads as a sort of devotional toy, a
mere pious device, excellent in its way as a help for simple, rude,
uneducated people who cannot even read, but never meant for
intellectual persons like themselves. Nay, it is a solid, scriptural
devotion, useful for all, and fit to be our chief daily proof of
filial loyalty to the Mother of God. Rohrbacher, at the 449th page of
the 71st volume of his "History of the Church''— that is a
tremendous number of volumes for a single work, but so I have it in
my note—asks a string of questions which brings out very well the
nature of the Rosary. " The sign of the Cross with which it
begins—is it not the mark of a Christian ? Is not the Apostles'
Creed (These preliminary prayers do not belong to the Rosary, and are
not necessary for the gaining of the Indulgences attached to it.) the
profession of faith which the martyrs recited at their baptism and
under the axe of the executioner ? Is not the Our Father the prayer
which our Lord Himself deigned to teach us? Was not the Hail Mary
pronounced by an Archangel in the name of Heaven, continued by the
holy Mother of the Baptist whom the Holy Ghost inspired to
speak and finished by the Church with whom that Spirit abides for
ever ? Is not the Gloria Patri the everlasting cry of praise that
goes up to the Adorable Trinity from men and angels, from all times
and from all places ? Are not the fifteen mysteries that were
proposed here for our meditation an abridgment of the Gospel ? In
truth I know of no practice better adapted for facilitating
attention, piety, and devotion in prayer, the meditation of mind and
heart. I say this for the learned who are ignorant of it, not for the
ignorant who have learned it by experience"
Yes, the use
of the Rosary beads is by no means to be confined to those who cannot
read, who cannot use a prayer-book or other book of devotion. Even
priests who are compelled (blessed compulsion !) to give a
considerable portion of their day to the ritual and liturgy of the
Church, must not reckon the Rosary among those private devotions
which may be supposed to be satisfied by the devout recitation of the
Divine Office. I will venture to emphasise this point by the
authority of a priest who is dead nearly forty years. Yet some in
Ireland, even outside the Society to which he belonged, remember
still the holy and gifted Father Daniel Jones. To one of his younger
brethren who had accused himself of some shortcoming with regard to his way of
saying the Rosary, the amiable saint took the trouble of giving the
following counsel, and his penitent took the trouble of at once
writing it down exactly. " I had occasion to write lately to
Father Etheredge of the English Province, and I told him that I had
never ceased to be grateful for a warning he gave me when I was
ordained priest. Up to this, he said, the Rosary was imposed on you
as an obligation for various intentions, but now all that is
satisfied for superabundantly by the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and
you will be tempted sometimes to be careless about saying the Rosary.
Take great pains not to yield to the temptation.' ''
It would be
very well for us to stir ourselves up sometimes to perform this act
of filial piety better by remembering all that the Rosary has been to
countless generations of simple and devout souls since this devotion
first became popular—all that it has been and is and will be in the
Catholic homes (for instance) of Ireland and in holy convents there
and everywhere. In country chapels on Sunday morning, waiting for the
arrival of the priest, how piously the good women say their beads !
In trouble and poverty how many have been comforted and strengthened
by this act of piety which puts them in communication with the Queen
of Heaven.
Before
beginning to say their Rosary in private, some make use
of this little rhyme to stir up their fervour :—
Mother! now
I'll say my beads,
For my soul some comfort needs;
And what better can
there be
Than to raise our hearts to thee,
Sweet Mother
?
But sometimes
it might be more effective to remind ourselves of the good company we
are entering—how many souls very dear to God are at that moment
employed as we are : good humble folk such as I have just referred
to, or nuns kneeling before the altar of their convent chapel or
pacing slowly the convent alleys with beads in hand and heart in
heaven. With these and with all who are similarly engaged in every
corner of the Church, all the world over, let us join our hearts when
we set about saying the Rosary.
A few more
thoughts about its worth in general before descending to particulars.
The Rosary
is, first of all, a prayer ; and all the encomiums that can be heaped
upon prayer in general are true of this prayer. Every prayer, every
cry of the soul to God, every expedient and artifice that can entice
us to pray, to raise our hearts to God, to turn to God, to think of
God, is good and holy and salutary and praiseworthy.
But this
prayer is, secondly, a long prayer. The goodness of a prayer does not
indeed depend upon its length. My Jesus, mercy ! '' is a good
prayer. " O God, be merciful to me a sinner,' is an excellent
and efficacious prayer, producing often the blessed results
attributed to it by our Lord Himself in the parable (if it be merely
a parable) of the Pharisee and the Publican who went up into the
Temple to pray. But perseverance in prayer is both desirable and
difficult; and the Rosary helps us to persevere in prayer. The
perseverance and piety exercised in so prolonged a prayer as the
Rosary are in themselves more meritorious and are calculated to
influence the soul more deeply and more permanently. No other form of
prayer nearly so long has ever wound itself so closely round the
hearts of the faithful, beguiling them into forgetfulness of its
length, when recited habitually with fitting dispositions—so
diversified is it, so interesting when we take fair pains to enter
into its spirit, and withal, in spite of its repetitions, so little
monotonous. Those repetitions are surely not '' vain repetitions,'
for they are repetitions of the divinest prayers that human lips can
utter, the prayers which Jesus Himself prescribed as a model prayer—"
Thus shall ye pray ''—and the prayer which the Holy Ghost dictated
to the Archangel at the sublimest moment of the world's story.
With these
best of vocal prayers mental prayer may be joined ; for while the
beads glide through our fingers and the Hail Marys fall from our
lips, our minds and hearts may be quietly turned towards one of the
joyful, sorrowful, or glorious mysteries of our Lord's life, such as
every prayer-book explains them to us.
Our Lord's
Life ? Yes, for in each of these scenes our Lord is the principal
figure, as He must needs be, even when His Blessed Mother is beside
Him. We call it the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin ; but, like
everything that is hers, it is much more her Divine Son's than her
own. Even in her own Hail Mary the central word, the central thought,
is Jesus, the blessed fruit of her womb. Ah ! when that moment comes
of which each Hail Mary reminds us— pray for us, sinners, now and
at the hour of our death "— when Death shall have come and
after that the Judgment, and we shall stand before the Judgment-seat
of that Jesus whom every Hail Mary blesses, we shall have no fear of
the reproach that Heresy flings at us, as if forsooth in praying to
the Mother we blasphemed or slighted the Son. The moments we shall
have spent in saying the Rosary will not be the portion of our lives
that we shall then regret.
The ordinary
way of saying the Rosary is another of the innumerable triplets or
trinities that meet us
everywhere. Though the Psalterium Marianum consists of 150 Hail Mars
as King David's Psalter consists of 150 Psalms, the faithful divide
it into three parts, each consisting of 50 Hail Marys, and the daily
portion is limited to these five decades, each preceded by an Our
Father and followed by a Glory be to the Father, &c.
Again, this
three-fold division into Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries may
perhaps, be considered another of the many instances in which it
seems possible to discover a special propriety in assigning one of
the three to each of the Three Divine Persons in order. The plainest
point in the present case is that the Sorrowful Mysteries, which come
second, belong specially to the Second Person, the Man of Sorrows,
Jesus Crucified. He, and He alone, is present in each of these
mysteries. The Sorrows are all His own. Though, of course, the First
Person of the Blessed Trinity is in all the others also, yet a
certain attribution to Him of the Joyful Mysteries may be ventured,
as the Archangel of the Annunciation represents the Eternal Father in
His Embassy to the Immaculate Virgin ; on the morning of the Nativity
that Voice might well have been heard which spoke thirty years later
: " This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased—hear ye
Him!'' Yes, though all that is heard
is the wailing of a helpless Babe. This attribution is justified also
in the fifth mystery, where Jesus asks, " Must not I be about My
Father's business ? '' Of course it is not pretended that this
distribution of the Rosary-Mysteries between the Three Divine Persons
is more than an application of the yearning to find traces of the
Trinity in the works of God. But even to advert to the idea in order
to reject it keeps the mind alert and prostrates it before the
fundamental mystery of mysteries, Immortalis et Invisibilis God the
Three in On.
Not by any
arbitrary choice of private devotion, however, but by an authorised
arrangement in force among the pious faithful and set forth in our
prayer-books, the three divisions of the Rosary are definitely
assigned to certain Sundays of each year and certain days of each
week. As regards the Sundays, the year may be considered as
consisting of Christmastide, Passion-tide, and Eastertide ; but we
here give to those terms a much wider signification than they
generally bear. From the first Sunday of Advent to the Sunday before
Lent we meditate on the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary; on all the
Sundays of Lent on the Sorrowful Mysteries; on Easter Sunday, and all
the Sundays after it till the ecclesiastical year begins again with
Advent, we meditate on the Glorious Mysteries.
Finally in
each week each of the three parts of the Rosary is used twice over on
the six week-days, so that the Joyful Mysteries are assigned to
Monday and Thursday the Sorrowful to Tuesday and Friday, the Glorious
to Wednesday and Saturday. Fortunately in this arrangement the
Sorrowful Mysteries fall to Friday, which is our weekly commemoration
of the Passion; and Saturday, which is the Blessed Virgin's day, is
the most suitable day for the Glorious Mysteries which end with our
Lady's Coronation and the everlasting Sabbath of Heaven.
Some of the
foregoing suggestions, even for those who will only think of them (as
I said before) to reject them, may yet help occasionally to awaken
our attention while saying the Rosary ; they may serve as pegs to
hang ideas on. But all of us would draw profit from some attempt to
follow the method used generally, I think, by the Sisters of Mercy.
Instead of breaking the flow of the Hail Marys by saying (for
instance) Blessed is the fruit of Thy Womb, Jesus, who was crowned
with thorns," and so for the other mysteries, it is better at
the beginning of each decade merely to name the mystery attached to
it, with the briefest possible prayer for a corresponding virtue.
Thus on Monday and Thursday throughout the year, and on the Sundays
from the beginning of Advent to Lent, we remind ourselves before
the first decade of the first of the Joyful Mysteries: " The
Annunciation. O Blessed Mother, obtain for me your love of humility"
And as the beads slip through our fingers, we keep before our mind a
picture of the scene of that mystery and bow at the name of Jesus as
if we were present at it.
Second
Joyful Mystery: The Visitation. O Blessed Mother, obtain for me your
love of fraternal charity.
'Third
Joyful Mystery: The Nativity. O Blessed Mother, obtain for me your
love of holy poverty.
Fourth
Joyful Mystery : The Purification* O Blessed Mother, obtain for me
your love of holy purity.
Fifth Joyful
Mystery : The finding in the Temple, O Blessed Mother, obtain for me
your love of holy obedience.'
A little
reflection will show us how each of the virtues suggested as the
objects of our prayer springs from the mystery it is linked with ; as
in the last of them, the Finding in the Temple, which ends with that
summary of our Lord's Hidden Life, Erat subditus illis ' He was
subject to them," a lifetime of obedience. The Nativity, which
shows the Incarnate Son of God born in a stable and cradled in a
manger, suggests a love of poverty. In the Annunciation the lowliness of the
Handmaid of the Lord— ecce Ancilla Domini —suggests Humilty; and
more plainly still the Purification and Purity, the visit to
St-Elizabeth and Charity, are linked with one another.
More
arbitrary is the selection of graces to be prayed for with each
decade of the Sorrowful Mysteries, which in the scheme I am following
are these in order : ist, a love of silence and resignation— Not My
will but Thine be done "; 2nd, mortification; 3rd, meekness;
4th, patience; 5th, the Crucifixion suggests a prayer for an ardent
love of God. This last we might be reminded of by the words"
Greater love than this no man hath that a man lay down his life for
his friend.'
Finally, St. Paul's dictum (i Cor. xv. 17), If Christ has not arisen, your faith
is vain,' makes it natural to link the First Glorious Mystery with
faith. "O Blessed Mother, obtain for me a lively faith.'' The
Ascension, a confident hope— "I go to prepare a place for
you.'' The Descent of the Holy Ghost, true zeal for the glory of God—
for not till then did the Apostles go forth boldly to preach the
Gospel. Last of all, the Assumption joins together again for ever the
hearts of the Mother and the Son, and we naturally pray, "O Blessed
Mother, obtain for me constant union with the Sacred Heart of Jesus,"
while her Coronation
suggests as our aspiration before the last of the Fifteen Mysteries
of the Rosary, O Blessed Virgin, obtain for me the grace of
confidence in your prayers and the grace of final perseverance.'
Better, however, all through to say "for us" not merely "for
me," and to include many or all in our prayer.
Even the
effort, often unsuccessful, to make use of these or other fiae
industriae in our saying of the Rosary, will make our prayers more
pleasing to Him whose sermocinatio est cum simplicibus. A minute or
two would be well spent in ending with some such prayer as this: "
O glorious Queen of Heaven, accept this Rosary which as a crown of
roses we lay at your feet; and help us, O most gracious Lady, join
your prayers with ours when we turn to God and pray: O God, whose
only begotten Son by His Life, Death, and Resurrection has purchased
for us the rewards of eternal life, grant, we beseech Thee, that,
meditating upon the mysteries of the most Holy Rosary, we may imitate
what they contain and obtain what they promise, through Jesus Christ
our Lord. O Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, pray for us.
