Mystery by Mystery
A Biblical walk through the rosary
If you aren’t familiar with the rosary, there is no better month than October to devote yourself to it as this is the month Holy Mother Church devotes herself to the rosary. I could write about how beautiful a prayer it is; about its power; and about how, when praying the rosary, the Christian is looking at the Gospel message through the eyes of Mary, the mother of Jesus. But words fail. Rather, I’ll let Pope St. John Paul II do the introductions from his beautiful apostolic letter, Rosarium Virginis Mariae.
“The Rosary of the Virgin Mary...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 Saviour, “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.”-Christine
The Study
