Protestants and the Rosary

(Sharing at the Novena to Our Mother of Perpetual Help on 18 December 2010)

If you were to do a Google search on the Protestants and the Rosary, you would find that for many Protestants, the Rosary captures everything that is wrong with Roman Catholicism – an excessive (and perhaps idolatrous) focus on Mary’s role and mechanical prayers. But is this a fair characterisation? And might it be that the Rosary has something to offer Protestants?

The “Praying to Mary” Objection: Since the Rosary consists largely of “Hail Mary”s, many Protestants see this as one more instance of Catholic Mariology. But Catholics will tell you that these are not prayers to Mary in the sense that one would pray to God the Father or to Jesus, but are requests asking for Mary’s intercession. There seems to be no good argument that it is wrong in principle to ask for the prayers of the Mother of God, if we allow, as we surely must, that it is alright to ask for the prayers of other living Christians and that death does not severe us from the Communion of the Saints.

The “Vain Repetition” Objection: Do the Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s of the Rosary constitute “vain repetition” as condemned in the Bible? Well, most Protestants pray the Our Father (the Lord’s Prayer) as well as other pre-written prayers (the Psalms, etc.) so the objection cannot be to written prayers per se. Moreover, it seems that what Jesus is condemning in, e.g. Matthew 6:7 is a kind of prayer that seeks to cajole the deity into doing what you want by means of repetition. By contrast, the Rosary is intended to be a prayer wherein one meditates on the Mysteries of Christ’s life. The movement of the fingers and the lips are supposed to help avoid distractions and allow the mind and spirit to enter into a deeper contemplative state. This is not to say that the Rosary cannot become a mechanical or self-centered prayer, but so can any other prayer, including the ones we come up with ourselves.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the Rosary among the Anglicans, the Episcolians, Methodists and the Lutherans. Known as the Christian Prayer Beads, it is not used as a form of intercession but as an aid to prayer.

An Anglican theologian and preacher, Austin Farrer, describe his own change of heart about the Rosary. He says that “If I had been asked two dozen years ago for an example of what Christ forbade when he said ’Use not vain repetitions,’ I should very likely have referred to the fingering of beads. But now if I wished to name a special sort of private devotion most likely to be of general profit, prayer on the beads is what I should name. Since my previous opinion was based on ignorance and my present opinion is based on experience, I am not ashamed of changing my mind.”

When all has been said about it, what the Rosary prayer does is to draw us to Jesus, and to help answer our prayer that we may see him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly, every day that we are given of this life on earth.