From the bulletin for The Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Oct 27, 2024)
Parish School of Prayer, Pt 11: The Holy Rosary
Someone sent me an article recently containing the interview of an ex-KGB agent by a Catholic journalist. There, the agent discloses (or asserts) that the Soviet Union had been responsible for creating and diffusing certain influential theological currents by means of the World Council of Churches starting in the 1960s, currents which were especially impactful among Catholic theologians in Latin America and which, to an extent, are still operative in the Church today.
I suppose we should always take what is said by a one-time KGB agent with a grain of salt. But the claim does serve to illustrate what Our Lady might have meant when she told the children at Fatima in 1917 that, if her message was not heeded, “Russia will spread her errors throughout the world.” Those “errors,” best I can tell, have to do with a drive for “salvation” that is materialistic, atheistic, and immanentistic. That is to say: a religion founded on faith that human happiness can be attained here and now, without God, and solely on the basis of the distribution of material goods. Hmm… sounds like the world we are living in!
Viewed in this light, the remedies that Our Blessed Mother prescribed make total sense, in that to an atheistic materialist, they make no sense at all! Consecration to her Immaculate Heart, penance, and prayer of the Rosary for peace... these means are entirely spiritual, theocentric, and transcendent. And if they seem inapt for bringing about world peace, it is only because we ourselves have become too affected by the opposite way of thinking!
As the Month of the Rosary draws to a close, I want to offer a few reflections on that prayer’s power.
In the first place, the power of the Rosary need not have anything to do with the Rosary itself. If Heaven tells us, “Push this button and help will be sent,” we don’t need that button to have any inherent power beyond the meaning given to our pressing it. The Rosary is at least that: the “Bat Signal” for supernatural assistance! Like Naaman wading into the waters of the Jordan, or a Christian receiving any of the sacraments, we can expect a disproportionate effect from this simple instrument, since Heaven has endowed it with a power that exceeds its elements.
But of course, the Rosary is more than just an emergency flare. It’s a sacrifice, since it requires offering to God our most precious resource, which is time. And that time is spent at least in praying some words that are most pleasing to God: the profession of faith, the Lord’s perfect prayer, a prayer of blessing of Jesus and Mary, and one giving glory to the Holy Trinity. For the too-busy Marthas, the Rosary is a luxury few can afford; for the faithless Judases, it is utter waste. Those fifteen minutes could be spent so much more productively than in pious prattle! But for those who recognize that “one thing alone that is necessary” is worthy of some lavishments, the Rosary is true wisdom.
Deeper still, the Rosary is also a contemplative act. It invites us to ponder with Our Lady all the things that her Son said and did during the course of her life. Because these “mysteries” have both revelatory and saving power, to behold them in our mind’s eye with faith is transformative, quite apart from our ability to imagine or understand. Just like Eucharsitic adoration, to be in touch with these mysteries is to receive light and strength. And because both are imparted to our spirits, not our senses, the fruitfulness of the Rosary can be judged only by the virtue it enables us to practice, not the experience we have while we say it!
Finally, the personal level. Should we not trust that Our Lady, whose help we pray for (“now”) fifty three times with every Rosary, is present to all those who pray it? And if she is the one whom “the Lord is with,” should we not believe that Jesus is also present in a special way as well? In this sense, to pray the Rosary is to enter the intensely sanctifying experience of St. Joseph for a quarter hour: it is to spend quality time with Jesus and Mary, just as Joseph was blessed to do for so many years. No, not necessarily a mystical, ecstatic experience. Rather, a “Nazareth” experience of being with Jesus and Mary in the ordinariness of our own hum-drum lives. Exactly as they prefer it to be.
Perhaps we should not be so skeptical of the Rosary’s power to bring about world peace (especially since every other solution seems to have failed!). At St. Mark’s, we have the aspiration that each able parishioner has a weekly hour of adoration. But I wonder if the first step ought to be that we all commit to the daily Rosary. Oh, imagine what our Blessed Mother would do in us and through us!
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