Not always the same prayers were said on the rosary. In the Eastern Church there was a Rosary called the Akathist (Akathistos), which is a liturgical hymn recited in any position except sitting. It combined a long series of invocations to the Mother of Our Lord, held together by a scene from the life of Our Lord on which one meditated while saying the prayers. In the Western Church, St. Brigid of Ireland used a Rosary made up of the Hail Mary and the Our Father. Finally, the Rosary as we know it today began to take shape.
From the earliest days, the Church asked its faithful to recite the one hundred and fifty Psalms of David. This custom still prevails among priests, who recite some of these Psalms every day. But it was not easy for anyone to memorize the one hundred and fifty Psalms. Then, too, before the invention of printing, it was difficult to procure a book. That is why certain important books like the Bible had to be chained like telephone books; otherwise people would have run off with them. Incidentally, this gave rise to the stupid lie that the Church would not allow anyone to read the Bible, because it was chained. The fact is, it was chained so people could read it. The telephone book is chained, too, but it is more consulted than any book in modern civilization!
The people who could not read the one hundred and fifty Psalms wanted to do something to make up for it. So, they substituted one hundred and fifty Hail Marys. They broke up these one hundred and fifty, in the manner of the Akathist, into fifteen decades, or series of ten. Each part was to be said while meditating on a different aspect of the life of Our Lord. To keep the decades separate, each one of them began with the Our Father and ended with the Doxology of Praise to the Trinity. St. Dominic, who died in 1221, received from the Blessed Mother the command to preach and to popularize this devotion for the good of souls, for conquest over evil, and for the prosperity of Holy Mother Church, and thus gave us the Rosary in its present classical form.
Practically all the prayers of the Rosary, as well as the details of the life of our Savior on which one meditates while saying it, are to be found in the Scriptures. The first part of the Hail Mary is nothing but the words of the angel to Mary; the next part, the words of Elizabeth to Mary on the occasion of her visit. The only exception is the last part of the Hail Mary—namely, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.” This was not introduced until the latter part of the Middle Ages. Since it seizes upon the two decisive moments of life: “now, and at the hour of our death,” it suggests the spontaneous outcry of people in a great calamity. The Black Death, which ravaged all Europe and wiped out one-third of its population, prompted the faithful to cry out to the Mother of Our Lord to protect them, at a time when the present moment and death were almost one.
The Black Death has ended. But now the Red Death of Communism is sweeping the earth. In keeping with the spirit of adding something to this prayer when evil is intensified, I find it interesting that, when the Blessed Mother appeared at Fátima in 1917 because of the great decline in morals and the advent of godlessness, she asked that, after the “Glory be to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” we add, “O MY JESUS, forgive us our sins, save us from the fire of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those who are most in need of Thy mercy.”
It is objected that there is much repetition in the Rosary because the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary are said so often; therefore, it is monotonous. That reminds me of a woman who came to see me one evening after instructions. She said: “I would never become a Catholic. You say the same words in the Rosary over and over again, and anyone who repeats the same words is never sincere. I would never believe anyone who repeated his words, and neither would God.” I asked her who the man was with her. She said he was her fiancé. I asked: “Does he love you?” “Certainly, he does.” “But how do you know?” “He told me.” “What did he say?” “He said, ‘I love you.’” “When did he tell you last?” “About an hour ago.” “Did he tell you before?” “Yes, last night.” “What did he say?” “‘I love you.’” “But never before?” “He tells me every night.” I said: “Do not believe him. He is repeating; he is not sincere.”
The beautiful truth is that there is no repetition in, “I love you.” Because there is a new moment of time, another point in space, the words do not mean the same as they did at another time or space. A mother says to her son: “You are a good boy.”
She may have said it ten thousand times before, but each time it means something different; the whole personality goes out to it anew, as a new historical circumstance summons forth a new outburst of affection. Love is never monotonous in the uniformity of its expression. The mind is infinitely variable in its language, but the heart is not. The heart of a man, in the face of the woman he loves, is too poor to translate the infinity of his affection into a different word. So, the heart takes one expression, “I love you,” and in saying it over and over again, it never repeats. It is the only real news in the universe. That is what we do when we say the Rosary; we are saying to God, the Trinity, to the Incarnate Savior, to the Blessed Mother: “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Each time it means something different because, at each decade, our mind is moving to a new demonstration of the Savior’s love—for example, from the mystery of his love which willed to become one of us in his Incarnation, to the other mystery of love when he suffered for us, and on to the other mystery of his love where he intercedes for us before the heavenly Father. And who shall forget that Our Lord himself in the moment of his greatest agony repeated, three times within an hour, the same prayer?
The beauty of the Rosary is that it is not merely a vocal prayer. It is also a mental prayer. One sometimes hears a dramatic presentation in which, while the human voice is speaking, there is a background of beautiful music, giving force and dignity to the words. The Rosary is like that. While the prayer is being said, the heart is not hearing music, but it is meditating on the life of Christ all over again, applied to his own life and his own needs. As the wire holds the beads together, so meditation holds the prayers together. We often speak to people while our minds are thinking of something else. But in the Rosary we not only say prayers, we think them. Bethlehem, Galilee, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Golgotha, Calvary, Mount Olivet, heaven—all these move before our mind’s eye as our lips pray. The stained-glass windows in a church invite the eye to dwell on thoughts about God. The Rosary invites our fingers, our lips, and our heart in one vast symphony of prayer, and for that reason is the greatest prayer ever composed by man. The Rosary has a special value to many groups: (1) the worried, (2) the intellectual and the unlearned, (3) the sick.
1. The Worried. Worry is a want of harmony between the mind and the body. Worried people invariably keep their minds too busy and their hands too idle. God intended that the truths we have in our mind should work themselves out in action. “The Word became flesh”—such is the secret of a happy life. But in mental distress, the thousand and one thoughts find no order or solace within and no escape without. In order to overcome this mental indigestion, psychiatrists have taught soldiers suffering from war shock how to knit and do handicrafts, in order that the pent-up energy of their minds might flow out through the busy extremities of their fingers.
This is, indeed, helpful, but it is only a part of the cure. Worries and inner distress cannot be overcome by keeping the hands alone busy. There must be a contact with a new source of Divine Energy and the development of confidence and trust in a Person whose essence is love. Could worried souls be taught the love of the Good Shepherd who cares for the wayward sheep, so that they would put themselves into that new