Page 7 - St. Joseph Messenger October 2020

The Most Holy Rosary

Hail Mary, Full of Grace . . .

O as a way of developing the skill of mental prayer.
ne of the more well-known devotions of
the Church is the Most Holy Rosary.
They acquired the habit of praying as they worked
Rosary beads are a way of counting repe-
titions of vocal prayers, but these repetitions of the at repetitive manual tasks around the house and on
the farm—planting seeds, plowing the fields, har-
Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer are not the focus vesting, crops, churning butter, and so forth. They
of the devotion. The vocal prayers are intended to were encouraged by the monks to work with their
aid us in meditative prayer. hearts set on heavenly things.

There are twenty mysteries of the Rosary and Sometimes, at the end of a hard day of work,
they are divided into four sets: the Joyful, which Catholic peasant families would come together to
include the birth of Jesus; the Sorrowful, which pray by counting their meditations with little
include the Passion and death of Our Lord; the stones, sometimes stringing these pebbles together
Glorious, which include His Resurrection and
Ascension; and the Luminous, which include the
Transfiguration.

Each of these mysteries includes five decades.
A decade is a series of ten prayers, in this case a
collection of ten Hail Marys prefaced by the
Lord’s Prayer and followed by the Glory Be
(otherwise known as the Doxology).

Regular meditation on the mysteries of the Rosary
keeps Christ and His work always before our eyes,
and always in our hearts. Getting into the habit of
reciting the Rosary daily draws us closer to Christ
and makes us more receptive to the graces He
offers us. In short, the faithful practice of reciting
the Rosary deepens our Catholic faith.

Origins of the Rosary
The devotion of the Rosary was developed over
centuries by the laity of the Church. Like all the
Church’s devotions, the Rosary is rooted both in
the Bible and in the Church’s tradition of praising
and petitioning God. Rosary, Mother of God
with Sts. Dominic and Francis of Assisi
The peasants of Europe, who were the bedrock of Nicola Grassi
the Church throughout the Middle Ages, adopted Oil on canvas
the practice of repeating the Our Father 150 times Narodna Galerija Slovenije, Ljubljana

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