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