Rosary: Many tests--one treasure, The

Spiritual Life, Summer 2000 by Dickson, Charles

THE ORIGINS OF THE ROSARY are buried in history, surrounded by a multitude of stories, not all of which have been verified. The rosary has been adapted and readapted by diff erent nations and cultures. It has come under attack both from inside and outside the Catholic Church. It has undergone additions and deletions. Yet today, some ten centuries after its earliest known use, the rosary is still the most commonly said private devotion in the Catholic Church. Throughout its long and varied history, the Rosary has had many texts, but it remains one treasure.

Earliest Use

While the earliest use of the Rosary remains hidden in the pages of yet-to-be-uncovered history, some historians believe it began with Irish monks who, as part of their prayer life, recited the 150 Psalms of David. Obviously, lay people found it difficult to share in this devotion because of its length, and so, encouraged by the monks, they instead said the Lord's Prayer 150 times in place of the Psalms.

Soon after this, the angelic salutation, "Hail (Mary) full of grace, the Lord is with you" (Lk 1:28), became popular among Christians in Europe. The people began substituting the angelic salutation for some of the Psalms. By the thirteenth century, the practice of attaching a particular meditation to each prayer began to appear. In the fifteenth century two Carthusian monks-Adolf of Essen and Dominic of Prussia-added a set of meditations to the prayer to the Blessed Virgin that reviewed Christ's acts of redemption. By the sixteenth century, the phrase, "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death," plus the Creed, and finally the Gloria were added to the prayers

The 150 Aves (Hail Marys), divided into three sets of fifty, are recited orally in groups of ten, punctuated by an Our Father. During each set of the Aves, the worshipper meditates on a series of fifteen mysteries-events in the lives of Christ and Mary that comprise five joyful, five sorrowful, and five glorious episodes. The joyful mysteries include: l) the Annunciation, 2) the Visitation, 3) the Nativity, 4) the Presentation, and 5) the Lost Jesus Found in the Temple. The sorrowful events comprise: 1) the Agony in the Garden, 2) the Scourging, 3) the Crowning with Thorns, 4) the Carrying of the Cross, and 5) the Crucifixion. The glorious mysteries celebrate: 1) the Resurrection, 2) the Ascension, 3) the Descent of the Holy Spirit, 4) the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and 5) the Coronation of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven.

Devotional Value of the Rosary Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen helped us understand these meaningful devotional practices when he reminded us that these three great sets of mysteries are what he termed,

The brief description of earthly life contained in the Creed: birth, struggle, and victory. The Christian life is inseparable from the joys of birth and youth, the struggles of maturity against the passions and evil, and finally, the hope of glory in Heaven.

Why this particular prayer, of all the medieval experiments in devotional exercises, succeeded so dramatically has to do not only with its form but also with popular religious piety. As a devotional exercise, the Rosary combined elements from three older kinds of meditations to create a new, more engrossing prayer that was particularly suited to the spiritual needs of the lay faithful. As a religious practice, it influenced as well as responded to the demands of the laity for new, more individual and private forms of religious observance.

As a lay person's breviary or common man's hours, this private devotion answered both the need for a meditative exercise to supplement the Mass--one that could be practiced in private-and also for a prayer to be said during the Mass by those who were not able to follow the Latin text of the celebration. The religious confraternity that was spawned by such devotion was officially established at Cologne, Germany, in 1475 and enrolled more than 100,000 members by the end of its first decade.

However, the years ahead that would lead into the middle of the sixteenth century were not easy ones. The devotional narrativemeditations, which had earlier been the focus of the prayer when it was promoted by the Carthusians, became submerged in a host of other sets of complicated numerical and non-narrative meditations. Increasingly, the practice of the Rosary became subject to abuse as it was being promoted as a means of earning points toward eternal salvation. By the early sixteenth century, it became the vehicle for a legalistic and arithmetical piety, which made it vulnerable to attacks by the Protestant reformers who vigorously rejected the entire practice of the Rosary as being a fraudulent form of religious devotion.

To be sure, there were certainly excesses that needed to be criticized, but by engaging in a sweeping denunciation of the Rosary itself, rather than focusing on some abuses associated with it, the Protestant reformers were throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water. Rightly practiced, the Rosary, with its devotion to Blessed Mary and her Son, Jesus, remains, to this day, a rich source for private devotions with a sound scriptural basis.