Hajja Salesjana September October 2017

1 6 The Rosary is one of the most cherished prayers of our Catholic Church.  Introduced by the Creed, the Our Father, three Hail Mary’s and the Doxology (“Glory Be”), and concluded with the Salve Regina, the Rosary involves the recitation of five decades, each consisting of the Our Father, 10 Hail Mary’s, and the Doxology. During this recitation, the individual meditates on the saving mysteries of our Lord’s life and the faithful witness of our Blessed Mother. Journeying through the Joyful, Sorrowful, Luminous and Glorious mysteries of the Rosary, the individual brings to mind our Lord’s incarnation, His apostolic ministry, His passion and death, His resurrection from the dead, and His ascension into glory.  In so doing, the Rosary assists us in growing in a deeper appreciation of these mysteries, in uniting our life more closely to our Lord, and in imploring His graced assistance to live the faith.  We also ask for the prayers of our Blessed Mother, the exemplar of faith, who leads all believers to her Son. The origins of the Rosary are “sketchy” at best.  The use of “prayer beads” and the repeated recitation of prayers to aid in meditation stem from the earliest days of the Church and have roots even in pre-Christian times.  Evidence exists from the Middles Ages that strings of beads were used to help a person count the number of Our Fathers or Hail Marys recited.  Actually, these strings of beads became known as “Paternosters,” the Latin for “Our Father.” The structure of the Rosary gradually evolved between the 12th and 15th centuries. Eventually 50 Hail Marys were recited and were linked with verses of psalms or other phrases evoking the lives of Jesus and Mary.  During this time, this prayer form became known as the rosarium (“rose garden”), actually a common term used to designate a collection of similar material, such as an anthology of stories on the same subject or theme.  Finally, during the 16th century, the structure of the five decade Rosary based on the three sets of mysteries prevailed. Centuries later in 2002 St. John Paul II introduced the Luminous mysteries to the Rosary, Tradition does hold that St. Dominic (d. 1221) devised the Rosary as we know it.  Moved by a vision of our Blessed Mother, he preached the use of the Rosary in his missionary work among the Albigensians, who had denied the mystery of Christ’s incarnation.  Some scholars take exception to St. Dominic’s actual role in forming the Rosary since the earliest accounts of his life do not mention it, the Dominican constitutions do not link him with it, and contemporaneous paintings of St. Dominic do not include it as an identifying symbol the saint. The Rosary and its Origin by Arinze Ani