The Rosary, a Contemplative prayer

The Rosary is at the same time a Marian prayer and a prayer centered on Christ – Christ-Centric – because we repeatedly invoke Mary as Mother of God and our mother and ask her to join us in our prayer to the Father as we recite the Our Father, and to the Most Holy Trinity as we recite the Glory Be. We ask her to help us to meditate and contemplate the mysteries of the life of her Son, our older brother and Savior, of which she is also a part.

In Fatima, as in the other Marian apparitions, Mary does not draw attention to herself, but exclusively to her Son. Her contentment comes not from us praising her, but from us praising her Son. As the proverb says, "Whoever my son kisses, my mouth sweetens."

While he was saying this, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’  Luke 11:27

You can’t love the son without loving the mother, so all the love directed to the child is indirectly directed to the mother. Just as all the praises given to the mother is directed to the son, as happened to that woman who, among the crowd, raised her voice to say to Jesus, "Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!"

The Rosary is not a prayer of thanksgiving, nor a prayer of petition, it is not even a prayer of lamentation like some psalms in the Bible. The Rosary is basically a prayer of meditation and contemplation. In fact, we proclaim and enunciate each Mystery by saying "in this Mystery, we contemplate..."

The story goes that one day someone confessed to Pope John XXIII his difficulty in praying the Rosary because he often gets distracted by the mechanical and repetitive recitation of the Hail Marys, to which the Pope replied, "What good is the Rosary if it is not to distract us?" (Distraction in neo-Latin languages has also the meaning as amusement).

Being a contemplative prayer, the repetitive recitation of the Hail Marys in the Rosary has the same purpose as the mantras in Buddhist spirituality: they occupy the mind, preventing it from jumping from one thought to another, thus allowing and facilitating contemplation of the Mysteries of the Lord's life. 

Hail Mary as a mantra
Contemplative prayers were fashionable in the sixties, just as Lectio Divina is today. Well-known figures of monastic life, such as Thomas Merton, traveled to the Far East, while others, like the Indian Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello, tried to bridge the gap between Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, and Christianity.

To attain contemplation at the technical level, we can certainly learn from Buddhism. However, contemplation has always existed in the Church from the desert fathers, the Benedictine monks, the Carmelites, Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, and even at the level of diocesan clergy at all times, like the Holy Curé of Ars exemplifies so well.

After exchanging beautiful words and poetry with each other, the lovers remain silent for hours on end, holding each other, saying nothing, doing nothing. In silence, contemplating a beautiful ecstatic landscape, both are examples of contemplation.

In a contemplative prayer there are no words and no thoughts. There is a feeling of emptiness of mind, a realization of self, a heightened sense of being present in oneself, centered in one's own body, without ramblings of the mind. This mind, which St. Teresa of Avila calls the madwoman of the house, is like a monkey that jumps from branch to branch.

To prayer through silence, to silence through prayer. It takes time and a lot of practice to be able to silence the mind. It is achieved by not consenting to thoughts the moment we are aware of them; in this way, little by little, we reach the emptiness of mind that reaches a high degree of self-awareness. It is at this moment that we open ourselves to the divine and experience His presence. Deus intimior intimo meo. God is nearer to me than my innermost being. In fact, in contemplation we seek union with God, the beatific vision, Heaven on Earth.

In the initial states of contemplation, to silence the discursive, imaginative and fanciful mind, the mantras are used, which are short phrases that are repeated continuously to entertain the mind with something and prevent it from wandering from thought to thought. The Russian pilgrim even repeated his mantra hundreds of times a day to achieve continuous prayer, the dream of all hermits.

In the Most Holy Rosary, the Hail Mary prayer repeated 50 times, 10 times for each mystery, is intended to keep the mind from being distracted from contemplation of the mystery. The purpose, therefore, is not to put our attention on each Hail Mary and Our Father that we pray, but to occupy the mind with these prayers as if they were mantras and thus jump into the contemplation of the divine.

How to pray the Rosary
Because it is a contemplative prayer, we must enunciate each mystery by inviting the faithful who pray it with us to contemplate that Mystery; for example, in the first Joyful Mystery we contemplate the Annunciation of the angel to the Blessed Virgin. The phrase "we contemplate" in the proclamation of each Mystery is important and should always be said, never omitted or implied precisely because the Rosary is a contemplative prayer; it is the contemplation on the mysteries of our salvation from the hands of Mary, praying with Mary as her son's disciples prayed with her on the night before Pentecost. (Acts 1:12-14)

For each day of the week, we meditate on different mysteries. Thus, on Mondays and Saturdays we meditate on the Joyful Mysteries, on Tuesdays and Fridays the Sorrowful Mysteries, on Wednesdays and Sundays the Glorious Mysteries, reserving the Luminous Mysteries for Thursdays.

There are several ways of praying the Rosary, but most people begin with the sign of the cross, followed by the Creed, one Our Father, three Hail Marys and one Glory Be. After these introductory prayers, the first mystery is announced accompanied or not with a short meditation, and followed by one Our Father and one decade of Hail Marys.

After the tenth Hail Mary of each decade, the Glory Be is prayed, followed by several interjectory prayers, depending on the place and the people praying, ending with the prayer that Our Lady of Fatima recommended to the little shepherds to pray after each mystery: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need (of Thy mercy).”

In the original Fatima prayer, this final statement (of Thy mercy) is missing, therefore grammatically it is understood that all souls need heaven. All countries have added this final expression in the sense that those who are furthest from God are the ones who are in most need of his mercy.

Hell is eternal death not eternal fire, which means eternal torture. God created us out of nothing so that we could do something with the life He gave us; those who do nothing with it, those who do not use the talents received from God for the benefit of their brothers and sisters for the greater glory of God, return to nothingness from which they were taken, for their lives were nothing and many, in fact, do actually believe that they came from nothing and will return to nothing.

Why does hell appear in the Bible as eternal torture? Because we are naturally more afraid of suffering than of death itself. The one who dies no longer suffers, we say, and the one who is being tortured begs for death as mercy. So often the badly injured friend asks the other friend for death as mercy. The fear of God does not mean to be afraid of God, and we should not choose God for fear of hell. This was a childish pedagogy in which children were educated. But today not even children should be educated in this way; reason should be the basis of all education, not irrational fear.

It is for the simple reason that the little shepherds could not imagine hell in any other way that this prayer of Fatima and the vision of hell did indeed involve fire. Our Lady showed them see hell as they understood it, as they conceived it, not least because nothingness has no graphic representation.

Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur – This maxim from scholastic philosophy can explain this point: whatever is received, is received in the manner of the receiver. The sea has plenty of water to give, but my bucket is limited in its capacity to receive; the same goes for our mind. The little shepherds saw hell as the Bible represents it and according to their capacity to understand it.

Finally, three Hail Marys are prayed for the intentions of the Holy Father, so that we may be united to all Christendom represented by him, and it ends with the Salve Regina preceded or not, according to the time available, by the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Our Father — The Our Father, which intersperses each Mystery, is much more than a simple prayer the Lord has taught us to recite occasionally. It contains what is the most important of the Gospel in a summarized form; it is, in this sense, a complete pocket Gospel because it contains what we should know and practice.

Since it is made up of several statements, unrelated to each other, it can be viewed as a list, like the shopping lists we make so not to forget the most important things. This list concerns the protocol of our relationship with God, that is, how our prayer should be structured; how we should address God, how to praise Him, what we should ask for, in what order, when and how. Therefore, more than a prayer, it is fundamentally a practical guide to prayer and life.

The Hail Mary – It is divided into two parts: the first is biblical and is composed of the greetings from the Angel Gabriel and Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, and the second originates from the faith of the Church, it is not known how or when or where it began to be used. Consequently, the Hail Mary prayer represents the perfect union between the Bible as the Word of God and the Church as a community of believers.

In an ascending movement, the first part, taken from the Bible, consists of 5 stairs that go up to Jesus. In a descending movement, the second part also consists of 5 stairs but this time going down to human reality, our death.

It cannot be understood by the advocates of the "sola fide sola scriptura solus christus", because there is a harmonious union between the Scripture, the Word of God, described in the first part, and the Tradition, that is, the history of the faith of the Christian community down through the ages, shaped in the second part. Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end and the center of history, is the core that unites the two parts.

The Glory Be – This is the invocation of God as One and Triune. One divinity in three different persons united in a triangle of love. It is the solution in the light of the dialectic of Greek philosophy between the one and the multiple. This prayer also reminds us that, made in the image and likeness of God, the human person is also one and triune: he does not exist or subsist outside the family.

Conclusion: As the apostles prayed with Mary before Pentecost, the Rosary today, reunites us with Her in prayer and contemplation of the Mysteries of her Son's life.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Rosary, the Prayer of the People

Rosary or “terço”?
What is called Rosary in other countries, in Portugal it is called “terço”, or third. What we are used to praying is in fact a third of the Rosary, which when complete is made up of three thirds, totaling 150 Hail Marys.  The number 150 is also the number of psalms in the book of the same name that is part of the wisdom literature in the Old Testament.

Hence it has been said that a complete Rosary was the breviary of the people or the laity who could not, like clerics and religious, pray the psalmody or read the bible because they did not have the time and often did not know how to read.

The complete Rosary was therefore made up of three thirds which were prayed by meditating: in the first third, the Joyful Mysteries, which corresponded to the Birth and Childhood of Jesus, in the second third, the Sorrowful Mysteries, which corresponded to His Passion and Death, and in the last third, the Glorious Mysteries, which corresponded to his Resurrection and Ascension into heaven. The term "Terço" or third means, in Portuguese, at the same time the prayer and the object with its 50 beads with which to pray. There are even rosaries made up of 150 beads, that is, a complete rosary.

The Church was slow in discovering that the Rosary was incomplete with only the meditation on the mysteries of the incarnation, birth, passion and death, and resurrection of the Lord. It lacked the public life in which Jesus of Nazareth by his preaching, attitude and way of living and acting, models for us the new man, the one who is, in himself, the way, the truth and the life to which every human being is called to emulate.

With the creation and integration of the Luminous Mysteries by Pope John Paul II in an apostolic letter titled Rosarium Virginis Mariae, written in 2002, the logic behind the three thirds being a complete Rosary fell apart. The complete Rosary is now four "thirds" of 50 Hail Marys each, totaling 200 and not 150 as before.

Origin and history of the rosary
As instruments of prayer, the rosary beads have their origin in India, in the third century before Christ. In Christianity, it was the desert fathers of the third and fourth centuries who began to use an instrument for counting prayers, especially the Our Father.

On the other hand, in ancient times the Greeks and the Romans used to crown statues of their gods with a crown of roses as a token of their love and gratitude. Perhaps it is based on this tradition that the Christian women led to martyrdom marched to their death dressed in their best clothes, wearing a crown of roses on their head, as a symbol of joy and surrender, to meet their spouse, Christ Our Lord. After their martyrdom, the Christians gathered these crowns and said a prayer for each rose for the souls of the martyrs.

 Lucia and Jacinta of Fatima liked to wear flowers in their hair. On the days of the apparitions, the three little shepherds dressed in their Sunday best, as if they were going to the Sunday Mass; the two girls put flowers in their hair, especially Jacinta, who was photographed wearing a crown of roses on her head on the occasion of the apparitions.

The praying of the Rosary appeared in the year 800 within the shadows of the monasteries, as a psaltery of the laity. It was not until the year 1214, however, that the Church received the Rosary in its present form. Tradition has it that it was given to the Church by St. Dominic of Guzmán who, in turn, received it from the Virgin Mary as a powerful weapon against the enemies of the faith.

The Rosary gained great momentum after the naval battle of Lepanto, in which Christians defeated the Turks, eliminating forever the danger of the Muslims subjugating Christian Europe. Just before the battle, Pope Pius V asked Christians to pray the Rosary to support the Christian fleet, so after the victory, the feast of Our Lady of Victory was instituted on the day of the battle, October 7, 1571, later changed to Our Lady of the Rosary. Today, the entire month of October is called the month of the Rosary.

The rosary as a religious object
The rosary beads were made purely as a counting object because it is difficult to mentally keep track of 50 Hail Marys or even 10 Hail Marys of each mystery. Over time, what was purely an object for counting became a religious object and many Christians, as they do with other religious objects, have it blessed by a priest.  

Religious objects must be icons, that is, they must transport our hearts and minds beyond the objects themselves; that is, it is more important what a religious object means or represents than what it truly is, in itself, and what material it is made of.

In practical life, however, many Christians do not distinguish between an icon and an idol, which is an object that has value in itself, such as a horn, a key, a horseshoe or other amulets, objects to which the superstitious confer a certain power.

This superstition is reminiscent of animism, the first stage in the evolution of religious sentiments and thoughts, during which primitive human beings believed that all realities and objects had a soul. Today we know that a material object cannot have psychic or spiritual power because it is material, it is dead and has no life in it. Thus, there are no objects that can bring good luck or bad luck, a black cat is simply a black cat and there are no haunted houses, but only haunted people.  

It has been said that the rosary is a weapon. Yes, the praying of the Rosary is a weapon and the object of counting is thus considered only as long as it represents this prayer; but it is not a weapon in itself. It could probably be considered idolatrous those who hang their rosary on the rear view mirror of their cars without ever praying the Rosary.

Personally, the vast majority of the time when I pray the Rosary, I do so without the counting object because I do it while walking through the park or even running or just wandering around. On these occasions, my counting object is the 10 natural ‘beads’ that God gave us on the fingers of our hands.

Visits of Our Lady and the exhortation to recite the Rosary
The Marian apparitions, especially those in Fatima, in their insistent call to pray the Rosary every day, have made this practice distinctive of Catholics as opposed to the rest of Christendom, such as the Orthodox and the Protestants.

The Rosary and Fatima
In the apparitions of Fatima, Our Lady asked the little shepherds to pray the Rosary daily, not just in one or two apparitions, but in all those that took place in 1917, and also in the ones that occurred in Tuy and Pontevedra to Sister Lucia. When Sister Lucia was asked why Our Lady insistently requested that the Rosary be prayed every day and not any other prayer, Lucia replied, "To pray the Rosary is something everybody can do, rich and poor, wise and ignorant, great and small."

In that region, and to some degree a bit throughout Portugal, the recitation of the Rosary was an integral part of the evening routine of families, before or after supper, basking in the warmth of the fireplace, the father or mother would lead the recitation and no children would ask for their parents’ blessings and go to bed before it was finished, even if they were already starting to nod off to sleep.

A family that prays together stays together. The television, like a Trojan horse, has disrupted the candour and the harmony of the home, and the Rosary has been displaced by the soap operas. Families no longer pray together as a family; prayer now belongs only to the individual and private sphere, just like any other religious practice that has left the social sphere to be relegated to the private and individual. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Portugal is one of the countries with one of the highest divorce rates at 70%. Television catches people at night tired, without energy not even to think, and in this time sitting on the couch is when they are most vulnerable and easily manipulated.

With a newspaper, on the other hand, we have the option of choosing the news that catches our attention; with news on the television, we don’t have this choice, we receive whatever they give us and what they give us is not the news of the facts, but an interpretation of the facts to fit the current political narrative. The mass media create a single narrative, making everyone think the same way about the same thing.

Before the apparitions of Our Lady, the little shepherds already prayed the Rosary, but soon after they began to pray it as Our Lady wanted. Especially Francisco, to whom the Lady said that he needed to pray many Rosaries to go to Heaven.

Indeed, the Rosary identified Francisco in his life, for there were days when he prayed ten Rosaries, and the rosary also identified him in death when his body was exhumed. Among so many bones buried in a common grave, Ti Marto, Francisco’s father, was able to identify his son's bones, because clinging to them was the still intact rosary that Francisco used in life.

Mary asked in Fatima for penance and prayer, both for ourselves and for others. The Rosary catapults us into contemplation on the Mystery of God, especially the Word incarnate. Therefore, meditating or not meditating, distracted or not, those who deeply love the Rosary and never let a day go by without reciting it, are, "ipso facto", truly people of prayer.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC