Thank you Allison Gingras (Reconciled To You) and Elizabeth Riordan (Theology Is A Verb) for another opportunity to re-publish our favorite posts on Worth Revisiting.
Stop for a visit now (and every Wednesday). The gifted writers who post
there each week will no doubt have much of value to offer you.
I wanted to share this:
Rosary Reflection – The Rosary Will Bring Back A Harvest of Holiness
(Originally posted May 9, 2015)
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| (Image Source: Marge Hendry
Photo©Michael Seagriff)
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[Another prophetic but ignored excerpt and plea from the Apostolic Letter On The Rosary of The Virgin Mary]
The
Rosary of the Virgin Mary, which gradually took form in the second
millennium under the guidance of the Spirit of God, is a prayer loved by
countless Saints and encouraged by the Magisterium. Simple yet
profound, it still remains, at the dawn of this third millennium, a
prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of
holiness. It blends easily into the spiritual journey of the Christian
life, which, after two thousand years, has lost none of the freshness of
its beginnings and feels drawn by the Spirit of God to “set out into
the deep” (duc in altum!) in order once more to proclaim, and
even cry out, before the world that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior,
“the way, and the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6), “the goal of human
history and the point on which the desires of history and civilization
turn”.
The
Rosary, though clearly Marian in character, is at heart a
Christocentric prayer. In the sobriety of its elements, it has all the
depth of the Gospel message in its entirety, of which it can be said to
be a compendium. It is an echo of the prayer of Mary, her perennial
Magnificat for the work of the redemptive Incarnation which began in her
virginal womb. 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. Through the Rosary the faithful
receive abundant grace, as though from the very hands of the Mother of
the Redeemer…
“A
number of historical circumstances also make a revival of the Rosary
quite timely. First of all, the need to implore from God the gift of
peace. The
Rosary has many times been proposed by my predecessors and myself as a
prayer for peace. At the start of a millennium which began with the
terrifying attacks of 11 September 2001, a millennium which witnesses
every day innumerous parts of the world fresh scenes of bloodshed and
violence, to rediscover the Rosary means to immerse oneself in
contemplation of the mystery of Christ who “is our peace”, since he made
“the two of us one, and broke down the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph
2:14). Consequently, one cannot recite the Rosary without feeling
caught up in a clear commitment to advancing peace, especially in the
land of Jesus, still so sorely afflicted and so close to the heart of
every Christian.
A similar need for commitment and prayer arises in relation to another critical contemporary issue: the family,
the primary cell of society, increasingly menaced by forces of
disintegration on both the ideological and practical planes, so as to
make us fear for the future of this fundamental and indispensable
institution and, with it, for the future of society as a whole. The
revival of the Rosary in Christian families, within the context of a
broader pastoral ministry to the family, will be an effective aid to
countering the devastating effects of this crisis typical of our age.
(St. John Paul II)
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