Our People

The Rosary: chain of love and life

Youth Faith Group, St Joseph’s Maronite Church Croydon

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
18 May 2005

A New Rite of the Rosary?
One of Pope John Paul’s last letters to the universal Church was Rosarium Virginis Mariæ by which he celebrated the twenty-fifth year of his pontificate. In that letter he asked us to re-examine every aspect of how we pray the Rosary:

•  the cycle of mysteries itself: John Paul suggests an additional five new mysteria lucis, Mysteries of Light or Luminous Mysteries – about which I will have more to say below
• the way the mysteries of the Rosary are announced: he suggests adding a clause more fully explicating the mystery to be contemplated and perhaps using religious art, especially icons, or a Scripture passage to help reflect upon the mystery being prayed
• the rôle of rhythm, breathing and silences in the Rosary: the Pope was not a fan of saying the Rosary like machine-gun rattle
• the rich meaning of the Pater, Ave and Gloria prayers: the Pope suggests we look again at the doctrinal content of these prayers and be especially conscious that the ‘centre of gravity’ of the Hail Mary is the word ‘Jesus’
• the use of repetition: John Paul suggests that the use of repetition in the Rosary should be not a dry and boring multiplication for its own sake, but rather a meditative technique parallel to the ‘Jesus prayer’ of the Eastern Church and expressing a tireless and ever-fresh outpouring of love (much like the Holy, Holy, Holy of the angel host or St Peter’s triple testimony of his love for Christ)
• the nature and uses of Rosary beads: Blessed Bartolo Longo (about whom more later) suggests that not only do the beads help us to count out our prayers and our progress, they are “a sweet chain” which links us to God and Our Lady and all the Church on earth and in heaven; John Paul takes up this idea himself
• ‘the trimmings of the Rosary’ (its opening and closing prayers such as the Creed, prayers for the pope, the Fatima prayer O my Jesus, the Salve Regina: John Paul II suggests we choose these carefully and look at concluding each mystery with a prayer for fruits specific to that particular mystery)
• the indulgences associated with Rosary
• appropriate adaptations for children and young people
• the distribution of mysteries of the Rosary throughout the week: he suggests that the Joyful Mysteries now be celebrated on Mondays and Saturdays, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursdays, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesdays and Sundays.
   
  Taken together this range of suggestions can be seen as a new-look Rosary for the third millennium, replete with new reasons to pray it.

How dare the Pope change the Rosary!

Some people will no doubt be disoriented by suggestions that the Rosary might change its shape – though anyone who has visited more than one parish, home or prayer group will have discovered that the praying of the Rosary is far from uniform and that each place has its own idiosyncrasies. The origins of the Rosary are in fact clouded in history and legend, especially Dominican legend. Dominicans like to attribute the Rosary to a gift of Our Lady to St Dominic, and sometimes of Our Lady to St Catherine of Siena, and sometimes (as in the famous image of Our Lady of Pompei) as a gift to both. To be honest there is not much evidence that either St Dominic or St Catherine prayed the Rosary, which was still evolving in their time, and certainly they did not pray it together since they lived in different centuries. But it is clear that it was the early Dominicans such as Blessed Alan della Roche who promoted this devotion.

The Dominicans, like all religious, pray the Psalms in the Divine Office every day. There are 150 Psalms, and even if a friar could learn all 150 off my heart from praying them so often, ordinary lay people could not be expected to. Nor could ordinary people afford to own their own copy of the Psalms before the age of printing—even if they could read, which many could not. So the friars invented the Rosary as a sort of simplified Psalter. Instead of 150 Psalms the faithful could recite 150 Paters (Our Fathers) or Aves (Hail Marys). To these, in due course, were attached a series of meditations. In one form or another this devotion has been part of Western Catholicism for at least seven centuries. Yet the precise form of the Rosary, especially which particular mysteries were to be meditated upon, was only gradually settled.

The last works painted by Blessed Fra Angelico, the great Dominican painter who is patron of painters, in 1451-53, were a series of miniatures, each just over a foot square, for the Silver Treasury of the Holy Annunciation Church in Florence. It is an exquisite collection of pictures from the life, death and glorification of Christ and his Blessed Mother, each with an Old and a New Testament quotation but clearly intended for people many of whom could not read. It is divided into groups roughly corresponding to our Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious mysteries and the Rosary was very possibly prayed before it. But there are forty scenes here to meditate upon, and these include not just the fifteen we have come to know as the Mysteries of the Rosary but others such as the Baptism of the Lord, the Wedding Feast at Cana, the Sermon on the Mount, the Transfiguration, the Raising of Lazarus, the Entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, the Washing of the Feet and the Institution of the Eucharist.

It was not until the next century that fifteen mysteries in particular were singled out and set down as ‘the Rosary’ and this was done by inclusion of a list in the Roman Breviary by Pope under St Pius V. As a Dominican Pius had a particular devotion to the Rosary and he promoted it through letters, indulgences, a Feast and this unusual inclusion in the liturgical books. Later popes played their part too. Pope Leo XIII, for instance, wrote thirteen encyclicals on the Rosary and the twentieth century popes have all been its ardent promoters, both in their writings and by their personal example. The ‘Tridentine Rite’ of the Rosary continued to evolve, with the popular addition of the Fatima Prayer ‘O my Jesus’, for instance, only occurring in the twentieth century.

But something decidedly odd happened in that same century. In the first half of the century there was a huge public and private devotion to the Rosary, including apparitions and sacred sites, rallies and Rosary crusades, novenas and Fulton Sheen and others promoting ‘the family Rosary’. Yet in the second half of the same century there came what John Paul called ‘a certain crisis of the Rosary’: enthusiasm for the Rosary diminished in some quarters, some people positively discouraged it, and a new generation (or two) have grown up without it.
Still, one might ask, why on earth change the Rosary at the very time when it is said to be in crisis? The Pope suggests several reasons. The cycle of meditations of the ‘Tridentine Rosary’ are by no means exhaustive. Indeed the present cycle rushes, as it were, from Jesus’ childhood (our liturgical Christmastide) to his Passion (our liturgical Paschaltide), missing out on what, in the liturgical calendar, we call ‘Ordinary Time’. To put it another way: the received Rosary covers the first two and the last two of the twenty-four chapters of St Luke’s Gospel, but leaves the other twenty chapters out. Yet if the Rosary is to function as a ‘compendium of the Gospel’, as the popes have called it, it should surely include meditations on some of the more significant moments in Jesus’ public ministry between his leaving Jerusalem at the age of 12 and his re-entry into Jerusalem immediately before his execution at 33. St Pius’ choice of fifteen mysteries to match the 150 psalms had its logic, but it was far from a conclusive reason to fossilize the number of mysteries at 15. And, insists the Pope, if the Rosary is to function as aid to prayer, contemplation and evangelisation in the new century and millennium, it will be important to bring out fully its Christological depth.

In what remains of my talk I want to examine the five new Luminous Mysteries, though in reverse order. In particular I want to explore the way these new mysteries themselves emphasize five crucial aspects of the renewal of the Rosary: that it be genuine prayer; that it be contemplative; that it be evangelical; and that it be both genuinely Marian and Christological.

The Fifth Luminous Mystery: The Institution of the Eucharist – and the Rosary as Prayer

The Rosary is, before all else, a form of prayer. Undoubtedly the greatest prayer which ever occurred is that recalled as the climax of five new Mysteries of Light: the Institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. One question which might immediately occur to us is: was Mary even present at the Last Supper? While the Scriptures are silent on the matter, religious iconography (such as the works of Bld Fra Angelico) suggest she was. But whether or not Mary was at that first Eucharist, she has been in the Canon of the Mass ever since!

John Paul II, following the Second Vatican Council, insists that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. But there is more to a river than its source, more to a mountain that its summit! Christian life is not limited to participation in the Divine Liturgy. There is, as the Council acknowledged, room for much other prayer and meditation as well. Furthermore, the Rosary can help us make more of the Mass: “By immersing us in the mysteries of Redeemer’s life, the Rosary ensures that what he has done and what the Liturgy makes present is profoundly assimilated and shapes our existence.” Indeed as the Pope points out, the Rosary is a way of ‘gazing’ and ‘remembering’ very like that of the Jewish celebration of the old Passover and the Christian celebration of the new Passover, the Eucharist. Much more than a mere recollection, zakar, anamnesis or sacred memory makes the saving events which are remembered present to the person(s) remembering them and inserts them, as it were, into that sacred scene, that saving event. Such sacred remembering is not just nostalgia for yesterday but has the power to transform our today. ‘Rosary remembering’ helps us then to practice that anamnesis which is central to the Eucharist and like the Eucharist opens us to the grace Christ won for us in the mysteries recalled.

There is another interesting link between the Rosary and the Eucharist which is touched upon in the Apostolic Letter. Just as sacraments and sacramentals take concrete physical realities such as water, oil, bread and wine, and make of them vehicles to convey sacred meaning and divine graces to bodily beings, so the Rosary respects the rôle of the human body with its use of sight, visual imagination, hearing, speaking, breathing, rhythm and touch through the tactile beads. The Rosary, like the rest of our sacramental economy, ‘brings us down to earth’ as bodily beings so that it might raise us up to heaven.

The Mass is our greatest prayer for peace. In Rosarium Virginis Mariæ John Paul II proposes the Rosary as our other great prayer for peace in face of the grave challenges confronting the world today. Why the Rosary? Well, for one thing, it has a long history of being prayed especially for that purpose, for example, at the time of the Battle of Lepanto. But the Pope gives a deeper theological analysis. The Rosary, he explains, involves contemplation of Prince of Peace and the Queen of Peace; it makes those who pray it peaceful themselves via its tranquil rhythm; it focuses our attention on the most afflicted and so makes us peace-makers.

Thus the Pope suggests that when we pray the Joyful Mysteries we should pray for peace in the womb and the home; when we contemplate the Luminous Mysteries we should resolve to bear witness to the Beatitudes Jesus preached to us; when we meditate upon the Sorrowful Mysteries we should be ready to join Simon of Cyrene in assisting our brothers and sisters weighed down by grief or despair; and when we delight in the Glorious Mysteries we should yearn to make this world a more beautiful, more just, more glorious, more heavenly place.

The new Fifth Luminous Mystery, then, recollects that first Eucharist where Jesus taught us most magnificently how to pray and where he bequeathed us his peace: “Peace I leave with you, my own peace I give you. Not the kind of peace the world offers you: no, my own peace I bequeath to you.”

The Fourth Luminous Mystery: The Transfiguration – and the Rosary as Contemplation

“The mystery of light par excellence is the Transfiguration… The glory of the Godhead shines forth on the face of Christ as the Father commands the astonished Apostles to ‘listen to him’ and to prepare to experience with him the agony of the Passion, so as to come with him to the joy of the Resurrection and a life transfigured by the Holy Spirit.” So John Paul II presents the scene of Peter, James and John entranced by the beauty of the Redeemer, as an icon of Christian contemplation.

At the Transfiguration, therefore, we join not only Mary but Peter, James and John, indeed the whole Church, and God the Father himself, in gazing upon the face of the Son radiant as the sun. “To look upon the face of Christ, to recognize its mystery amid the daily events and the sufferings of his human life, and then to grasp the divine splendour definitively revealed in the Risen Lord, seated in glory at the right hand of the Father: this is the task of every follower of Christ and therefore the task of each one of us. In contemplating Christ’s face we become open to receiving the mystery of Trinitarian life, experiencing ever anew the love of the Father and delighting in the joy of the Holy Spirit.”
This highlights a point already made strongly by Pope Paul VI: that as a reflection of Mary’s own experience, the Rosary must be a deeply contemplative prayer, no mere mechanical repetition of formulas, but rather a quiet rhythm and a lingering pace, helping us meditate on the mysteries of the Lord’s life as seen through Mary’s eyes and pondered in her heart. “With the Rosary, the Christian people sits at the school of Mary and is led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depths of his love.” For however instinctive it is to pray, we need to be trained in good habits and forms to give shape and encouragement to prayer: we need a school of prayer and the Rosary is one such school.

At Mount Tabor Jesus took his three favourites with him to contemplation school: to learn to meditate upon his mystery, the glory of his divinity, the beauty of his humanity, that happy fault which would be his terrible passion, and the bright promise of even greater Transfiguration to come for him and for all of us. When we pray the Rosary, then, not just when we pray the new Fourth Luminous Mystery but as we pray every mystery, we are invited to join them on Tabor and be enraptured, so that like Peter we end up babbling almost incoherently, ‘Master, it is wonderful for us to be here’!

The Third Luminous Mystery: The Preaching of God’s Kingdom – the Rosary as Evangelical

It is sometimes said that the Rosary was invented in an age before people could read the Bible for themselves and so is now irrelevant. Yet as several popes have insisted, the Rosary, properly understood, is ‘a compendium of Gospel’ and ‘a Gospel-centred prayer’. If anything it points us to, not away from, the Scriptures. John Paul II recalls that it was the Dominicans who were for centuries the principal promoters of the Rosary and that was no accident: for they were Order of Preachers and they saw it as way to counter heresy and teach true doctrine.
The Rosary has always been an evangelical tool, a means “to proclaim, and even cry out, before the world, that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour, ‘the way, and the truth and the life’, ‘the goal of human history and the point on which the desires of history and civilization turn’.” No mystery of the Rosary more clearly tells of this aspect of the Rosary than the new Third Luminous Mystery where we meditate precisely upon the preaching by which Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of God, calls to conversion and forgiveness of sins, teaches and forms people for life in the Kingdom.

To give an example of the Rosary as an evangelical opportunity: John Paul II noted that many people today are craving for techniques of meditation and for a new ‘spirituality’. All too often they go looking to non-Christian and even non-religious cults. There is an opportunity for the Rosary, here, because like these alternatives it helps people attain “a high level of spiritual concentration by using techniques of a psychophysical, repetitive and symbolic nature” but which unlike the alternatives offers solid content as well.

In the mediæval period, when the Dominicans first promoted the Rosary, it was part of their distinctively Christian ‘theology of body’. At a time when heretics demeaned everything bodily about the Christian religion – the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Sacraments – and everything bodily about everyday life – including the conception of new human life, marriage and the family, the friars preached that these things were all good, the gifts of a good God. The counter-creed of the Rosary is surely as important as ever today, for not only is there indifference to the Incarnation, Resurrection and Sacraments, but there is equal hatred for human life in its origins and equally malign pressures upon marriage and family life.

Why is the Rosary especially well-suited to preaching this particular aspect of the Good News? Why do we call it a chain of love and life? For two reasons. First, it focuses our meditation upon important saving events which involved the body: the Word-made-flesh in the Joyful mysteries, and in the new mysteries of the Baptism and the Transfiguration; mankind saved through this flesh, in the new mysteries of the Eucharist and in the Sorrowful mysteries; the flesh raised up to glory, in the Glorious Mysteries. Secondly, we recall those saving events not just in visual imagination, but even more bodily: through physical sounds and walking and sitting and genuflecting and kneeling and handling of beads. This was the way Dominicans have always prayed and it survives today in the Rosary: a deliberately physical prayer that reminds us, as St Paul put it, to “present our very bodies to God as a living sacrifice” (Rom 12:1).

As we take up the challenges of the new evangelisation and the new catechesis, we can do so confident that the Rosary is a powerful pastoral resource for every good evangelizer; and as we pray the new Third Mystery of Light we can do so with the greatest ever Evangelizer, Jesus Christ, as our model.

The Second Luminous Mystery: The Wedding Feast at Cana – the Rosary as Marian

Of the five Mysteries of Light the one in which Mary is most obviously present is the Wedding Feast of Cana; in the others she is in background, though as John Paul II suggests, she is always there saying what she said at Cana: ‘Do whatever he tells you’. Notice that, like John the Baptist, Mary at Cana points away from herself towards the Christ: far from being a rival with Christ for our attention, Our Lady of the Rosary acts as a kind of binoculars through which to focus on her Son.

“To recite the Rosary,” John Paul says, “is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ”. From the time of the Annunciation onwards, she is our exemplar of one who gazes on the face of Christ, with tenderness, adoration, wonder, sometimes joy, sometimes sorrow, sometimes glory. Hers is always “a penetrating gaze, one capable of deeply understanding Jesus, even to the point of perceiving his hidden feelings and anticipating his decisions, as at Cana”.

At Cana, too, we see another aspect of Mary’s life. There she is as intercessor, a most influential intercessor, due to her unique co-operation with working of the Holy Spirit and her unique relationship with the Son. Here she makes known to Jesus the needs of others and calls forth his free and generous response.

A last aspect of Mary’s rôle at Cana to which our Apostolic Letter draws some attention is that her words to Jesus are such very simple ones: “they have no wine”. Here she not only teaches us how to pray – very simply – but also demonstrates her enduring concern for the mundane, the everyday. In the Rosary we bring to our Redeemer through his Mother not just our cosmic problems, but “all the problems, anxieties, labours and endeavours which go to make up our lives. ‘Cast your burden on the Lord and he will sustain you’.”
Perhaps it is this mundane, everyday, aspect of the Rosary that has made it a favourite Catholic family prayer. John Paul II repeats the old adage: ‘The family that prays together stays together’. But he also explores why this is the case: the Rosary, he explains, teaches us communication skills, tolerance, self-sacrificial love; it offers very different images to those of the media and the global culture of drugs, hedonism, violence, meaninglessness and despair. This prayer, which has buoyed up the Pope himself ever since his own tragic childhood and through the many sufferings of his pontificate, he now offers anew to our families in the midst of their difficulties, with our heavenly Mother as guide, praying with us and for us as first she did at Cana in Galilee, our second new Luminous Mystery.

The First Luminous Mystery: The Baptism in the Jordan – the Rosary as Christological

At last we come to what is, in some ways, the central concern of Rosarium Virginis Mariæ: that the Rosary be seen as a prayer of and to Christ. In a sense, instead of calling it ‘the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary’, John Paul seems to be inviting us to call it ‘the Rosary of Jesus Christ, King of Most Holy Rosary – and of His Holy Mother’. Now that rather startling claim requires some explaining…

Paul VI, it was, who said that “though clearly Marian in character” the Rosary “is at heart a Christocentric prayer”. The “litany-like succession of Hail Marys is an unceasing praise of Christ” for it is Jesus who is the ultimate object both of the Archangel Gabriel’s announcement and the kindswoman Elizabeth’s greeting. John Paul II puts it this way: the Rosary is kind of as perennial Magnificat in which we join Mary in praising God for the work of the redemptive Incarnation. By focusing on those great things that the Almighty has done for us, Mary and her Rosary draw our attention to the Almighty himself.

No mystery of the Rosary could serve better to draw our attention to the Almighty than the new First Luminous Mystery, the Baptism of the Lord. Here, as Jesus rises from the waters, we see the heavens torn asunder, God the Father speaking, Jesus named by Him ‘My beloved Son’ and God the Holy Spirit appearing as a dove descending to anoint him as the Christ. This is the epiphany par excellence, the great showing forth, the revealing of Jesus as the Christ, true God celebrated by the Holy Trinity, but true man also, joining us even in the waters of Baptism.

From that moment, of course, Jesus begins his mission of drawing each of us into his identity, his destiny, his life, death and resurrection. We are drawn into these by Baptism, that most wonderful sacrament that “grafts the believer like a branch onto the vine which is Christ and makes him a member of Christ’s mystical Body the Church”. By reflecting on Jesus’s own Baptism in the Jordan, we are invited too to reflect on meaning of our own Baptism and its invitation to put on mind of Christ, to join his journey, to become his friend, to share his deepest feelings.

A constant theme of the preaching of Pope John Paul II has been the idea in Gaudium et spes that Christ reveals to us not only who God is but who we are. “Ecce homo!” says John Paul as he presents the mysteries of the Rosary anew to us, “Behold the man: the meaning, origin and fulfilment of man is to be found in Christ… Following in the path of Christ, in whom man’s path is ‘recapitulated’, revealed and redeemed, believers come face to face with the image of the true man.” Thus the fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine about the human person are told Christologically in the Rosary: in contemplating the Joyful Mysteries we treasure the sanctity of life and God’s plan for the family; in meditating upon the Luminous Mysteries we discover that human beings are made for the Kingdom of God; by following Christ to Calvary, we learn the salvific meaning of human suffering; by praying the Glorious Mysteries we see the goal towards which each of us is called, if we allow ourselves to be transformed by the Holy Spirit. Thus, says John Paul II, every mystery of the Rosary, carefully meditated, “sheds light on the mystery of man”.

This is very much the distinctive theological note of John Paul II. If we took into the face of Christ – through the looking-glass, as it were, of the Rosary – then we will see not just true God but also true man. If we look into the water of the River Jordan we will see reflected there what we are called to be. And out of that same water into which we too were plunged at Baptism, indeed out of the very grave itself, Jesus calls us as he raises us up to himself!
Conclusion

My thought in this talk has necessarily been complex, such is the richness of the text I have been exploring. John Paul II has given us, as it were, a new look at the Rosary, as part of that renewal of all aspects of the Church which was initiated by the Second Vatican Council. He has done so in a way which invites greater creativity with the Rosary and offers, as part of this, five new Mysteries of Light for us to mediate on. These five mysteries themselves highlight five aspects of the Rosary worthy of further reflection: that the Rosary is prayer, contemplation and evangelisation; and that it is Marian but above all Christological in its focus.

Appendix: On whose advice? A note about the ghostly ‘co-author’ of this Letter, Blessed Bartolo Longo
At the start of this talk I noted that it was Blessed Bartolo Longo who talked of the Rosary as a sweet chain, chaining us to God and to Mary, a chain of love and life. Though John Paul II noted the devotion of many great saints to the Rosary, he singled out Blessed Bartolo Longo whom he beatified in 1980 and here calls ‘the Apostle of the Rosary’. Sinner, satanist, social worker and saint, Longo’s story is the stuff of movies! A very modern saint in so many ways, his life spanned a good part of nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He grew up in a pious Southern Italian family where the Rosary was prayed daily, but as an adolescent he drifted away from the Faith. He studied law at the University of Naples, which was by then a rather different place to the university at which St Thomas Aquinas has been both a student and later a professor.

At university Bart became enmeshed in unsavoury political movements, free masonry and the occult. He entered the satanic ‘priesthood’ and on the night of his ‘ordination’ the walls shook with thunder, while blasphemous, disembodied shrieks knifed the air. He fainted with fright and for a long while afterwards was deeply tormented both physically and psychologically.

His family kept praying the Rosary for him. A friend warned him he was going mad and took him under his wing, introducing him to wise and holy people for support, especially a local Dominican priest, Alberto Radente. Father Alberto gave Bart detailed instruction in the Catholic Faith, including of course the writings of their compatriot Aquinas. He also encouraged Bart to return to his childhood practice of praying the Rosary. After much study, prayer and a lengthy confession, he was readmitted to the sacraments. He also joined a chapter of lay Dominicans (‘tertiaries’) where he was known as ‘Brother Rosary’.

Bart believed he was called to a dedicated single life, and not to be a priest, religious or married man. He took up an apostolate of preaching against the very occultism which had so messed him up, trying to extricate fellow students at university, student parties and cafes from the grip of this ‘spirituality’ and to provide them with basic instruction in the true faith. He also took up the care of the poor and the sick in this particularly depressed part of Italy, founding a convent of Dominican nuns to care for poor girls and bringing in the Christian brothers to care for the boys. Like his friend Leo XIII, author of encyclicals not only on the Rosary but also on theology of St Thomas Aquinas and the social doctrine of the Church, Bart understood the necessary connection between contemplative prayer (such as the Rosary), sound theology (such as he offered in his catechism classes), and social action on behalf of the maginalized.

When at one stage Bart was tempted to despair of ever being truly forgiven for his wicked past, his Dominican confessor reassured him that by preaching the Rosary he would work out his salvation under grace. Bart then demonstrated enormous imagination in doing just that – the sort of creativity John Paul II is looking for today. He organised talks, courses, booklets, new novenas, parish missions, even an annual Rosary Festival which included music, fireworks, races and a lottery! Like John Paul, Bart was a dramatist who understood the importance of engaging all the senses in prayer. He encouraged devotion to the miraculous image of Our Lady of the Rosary of Pompei, for instance, and built for it a famous shrine. He was still working at the Shrine, promoting prayer, catechism and confession, when in 1926 – surrounded by the poor children for whom he had laboured – he died praying the Rosary with them at age 85.

I leave the last words to John Paul II himself: “The Church has always attributed particular efficacy to this prayer, entrusting to the Rosary… the most difficult problems. At times when Christianity itself seemed under threat, its deliverance was attributed to the power of this prayer, and Our Lady of the Rosary was acclaimed as the one whose intercession brought salvation. Today I willingly entrust to the power of this prayer the cause of peace in the world and the cause of the family… and I look to all of you brothers and sisters of every state of life, to you Christian families, to you the sick and elderly, and to you young people: confidently take up the Rosary once again. Rediscover the Rosary in the light of Scripture, in harmony with the Liturgy, and in the context of your daily lives.

“May this appeal of mine not go unheard! At the start of the twenty-fifth year of my Pontificate, I entrust this Apostolic Letter to the loving hands of the Virgin Mary, prostrating myself in spirit before her image in the splendid Shrine built for her by Blessed Bartolo Longo, the apostle of the Rosary. I willingly make my own the touching words with which he concluded his well-known Supplication to the Queen of the Holy Rosary:

O Blessed Rosary of Mary,
sweet chain which unites us to God,
bond of love which unites us to the angels,
tower of salvation against the assaults of Hell,
safe port in our universal shipwreck,
we will never abandon you.

You will be our comfort in the hour of death,
yours our final kiss as life ebbs away,
your sweet name the last word from our lips:
O Queen of the Rosary of Pompei,
O dearest Mother,
O Refuge of Sinners,
O Sovereign Consoler of the Afflicted.
May you be everywhere blessed,
today and always, on earth and in heaven.”