Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
These words from Deuteronomy, chapter 6 caused the most important and universal popular devotion of the Old Law. It is from them that the Savior drew his answer to the Pharisees who asked him what the greatest law commandment was (Matt. 22). In Our Lord’s day and even now, observant Jewish men literally observe them in their daily prayers by tying a little leather box containing them on their foreheads and on their right hands. They also place them in a little shrine by the front door of their houses and venerate them with a kiss conveyed by the hand as they enter.
The revealed truths of our faith about God and the moral life are of course to be observed in the thoughts and deeds of our lives. Yet human nature also requires a bodily sign, what we would call a sacramental, as a reminder and a channel of the graces of the true faith which we believe.
For us Catholics, there are many ways to bring to mind and channel the mysteries of our salvation and life in God. First of all, there is the daily liturgy of the Church in the holy Mass and the Divine Office of the hours. Right beside these is the devotion of the holy rosary, which has been constantly and universally recommended to our daily use.
The rosary has many forms in the Church, but the most well-known and familiar is the so-called “Dominican” rosary. (There are also the Franciscan crown, and the Brigittine and Servite rosaries, and of course the Eastern form which uses the Jesus Prayer and often an invocation to the mother of God.) Universally in Christianity, East and West, the faithful have prayed daily using the rosary beads, combined with a prayerful awareness of the mysteries of our faith. Such a truly Catholic, truly universal practice is a sure sign that this way of praying is a work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers.
The rosary is truly a reminder, a sign for our understanding “between our eyes” and in our hands—that is, in our actions—of our participation in the joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious realities in which we live and move and have our being. Our beads are a kind of portable shrine bearing the cross of the Lord and the memory of his teachings and saving actions.
Our Lady has made many promises to those who pray and promote her great prayer. Traditionally there are fifteen, going back to the writings of the great Dominican preacher of the rosary, Blessed Alan de la Roche. He gathered these promises together from various sources and although they are not revelation in the strict sense, they are reasonable to believe, given the great force with which Our Lady has asked us to pray her rosary through the years. Just one of these promises would be enough motivation for us, in like fashion to the Jews of old, to set Mary’s rosary before our eyes and bear it in our hands and keep it in our homes and on our persons and venerate it with our kisses! Let us conclude this month’s reflections on the rosary with them:
- Whoever shall faithfully serve me by the recitation of the rosary, shall receive signal graces.
- I promise my special protection and the greatest graces to all those who shall recite the rosary.
- The rosary shall be a powerful armor against hell, it will destroy vice, decrease sin, and defeat heresies.
- It will cause virtue and good works to flourish; it will obtain for souls the abundant mercy of God; it will withdraw the heart of men from the love of the world and its vanities, and will lift them to the desire of eternal things. Oh, that souls would sanctify themselves by this means.
- The soul which recommends itself to me by the recitation of the rosary shall not perish.
- Whoever shall recite the rosary devoutly, applying himself to the consideration of its sacred mysteries, shall never be conquered and never overwhelmed by misfortune. God will not chastise him in his justice, he shall not perish by an unprovided death (unprepared for heaven). The sinner shall convert. The just shall grow in grace and become worthy of eternal life.
- Whoever shall have a true devotion for the rosary shall not die without the sacraments of the Church.
- Those who are faithful to recite the rosary shall have, during their life and at their death, the light of God and the plenitude of his graces; at the moment of death they shall participate in the merits of the saints in paradise.
- I shall deliver from purgatory those who have been devoted to the rosary.
- The faithful children of the rosary shall merit a high degree of glory in heaven.
- You shall obtain all you ask of me by the recitation of the rosary.
- All those who propagate the holy rosary shall be aided by me in their necessities.
- I have obtained from my divine son that all the advocates of the rosary shall have for intercessors the entire celestial court during their life and at the hour of death.
- All who recite the rosary are my sons, and brothers of my only son Jesus Christ.
- Devotion of my rosary is a great sign of predestination.