Updates on “A Crown of Roses A Day”

(Sharing at the Novena to Our Mother of Perpetual Help on 29 Oct 2011)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

On 2 February this year, our parish’s 50^th anniversary, we started weaving “A Crown of Roses A Day”. It is our Golden Jubilee gift to Jesus and Mary; also a gift to our poor brethren who received the rosaries we have made with our very own hands. We have pledged to pray the Rosary to make at least a complete crown of 20 decades a day collectively, and ultimately, one little crown or 5 decades of the Rosary for each person who received our rosaries. Our main objective, besides soliciting prayers for the poor beneficiaries, our parish and priests, our nation, the Church and the world, is to encourage daily praying of the Rosary. Why so? Because it has been known to be the surest way to holiness. It fits into our Parish Priest’s call to renewal of holiness in this Jubilee Year of grace for our parish.

Coming to nine months now, it is high time for some updates on our prayer effort, and to answer questions asked.

When we started, we were still counting the number of rosaries to be given away. Now, we know that we have given away 3015 hand-made rosaries, to the genuinely poor, who certainly deserve our prayers. So too the makers and contributors, whose faith, perseverance and hard work, with God’s grace and help, saw the project through. More information on the project will be made available later.

So we are to weave 3015 little crowns of roses. We will pray for the special intentions until we have fulfilled our pledge but our intentions are not limited. We are free to pray for other intentions, especially for the Pope and his intentions, alongside the special intentions. This prayer effort will extend well beyond our Jubilee Year, but it does not matter. Why? Because our main aim is to pray the Rosary daily. This habit is not to end with the closing of our Jubilee Year, for holiness is our life-long call as Christians. Thus, praying the Rosary daily would be a life-long endeavour. This so-called project is only to provide a platform as a stepping stone for more people to start praying the Rosary daily, even if only to be part of our Golden Jubilee celebration. Hopefully, the habit will stick on. Hence, extending this endeavour beyond our Jubilee Year reflects our desire to continue striving for holiness by praying the Rosary daily.

As of yesterday, 28 Oct, we have weaved 1729 little crowns of roses. We want not only to fulfil our pledge, but also more parishioners to participate. So far, our prayer warriors have been faithful chapel-goers who have been valiantly helping us keep our pledge by completing a crown a day. Surely our parish is much larger than that. Therefore, brothers and sisters, do encourage your dear ones, especially those who have not done so, to pledge and pray for the special intentions of “A Crown of Roses A Day”. If you’re Internet-savvy, do help those who are not to register their pledges online.

No time for the Rosary? St. Louis De Montfort wrote that it is alright to pray while doing work that permits vocal prayer. (De Montfort, 1954, p. 111) Fathers Faroni and Crisostomo pointed out that even if we go to Mass everyday, praying the Rosary daily is still required, as it is the medicine advocated by our Mother to keep our faith strong and healthy (Faroni & Crisostomo, 2006, p. 22).

We also encourage group prayers, for where two or more are gathered in the Lord’s name, He will be there amongst them (cf. Matthew 18:20). Moreover, as St. Louis de Montfort wrote in The Secret of the Rosary (De Montfort, 1954, p.112), we give Almighty God the greatest glory, do the most for our souls and scare the devil the most when we say or chant the Rosary publicly in two groups or choirs. Although the Month of the Rosary is drawing to an end, you can still join our Rosary prayer in the church at 5.20 p.m. every Saturday, before the Novena. There are numerous Rosary prayer groups in our BECs, cell groups and amongst parishioners which you can also join.

Last but not least, this prayer effort comes from a firm believe in what the Rosary can do to and for those who pray it faithfully. Let us not waste time to start on or to firm up our steps on this sure path to holiness, especially in our Jubilee Year of grace.

References:

De Montfort. (1954). Forty-Fifth Rose in The Secret of the Rosary

Faroni & Crisostomo. (2006). The Five Warnings

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.

Glorifying the Trinity

(Sharing at the Novena to Our Mother of Perpetual Help on 23 October 2010)

Our sharing this week will be the first of two-parts on how praying the Rosary glorifies our worship of the Blessed Trinity  and our contemplation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Why is this necessary?

Pope John Paul II, in his Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte  at the turn of the millenium, said that “The most important reason for strongly encouraging the practice of the Rosary is that it represents a most effective means of fostering among the faithful that commitment to the contemplation of the Christian mystery as a genuine ‘training in holiness’.

What is needed is a Christian life distinguished above all in the art of prayer”.

It is more urgent than ever that our Christian communities should become “genuine schools of prayer”.

In the Apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae of Pope John Paul II, the Rosary, under guidance of the Spirit of God, is a prayer loved by countless Saints.

Simple yet profound, it still remains, after two millenia of the spiritual journey of Christian life, a prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness.

It 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).

To recite the Rosary is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ.

Today we shall read into three of the Rosary prayers, the Apostles Creed, Our Father and Glory Be.

The Secret of the Rosary by St Louis de Montfort contains a beautiful explanation of the significance of the Rosary Prayers and is strongly recommended to improve our understanding of the importance of praying the Rosary.

The Creed or the Symbol of the Apostles is a holy summary of all Christian truths.

It is a prayer that has great merit because faith is the root, foundation and beginning of all Christian virtues, of all eternal virtues and also of all prayers that are pleasing to Almighty God.

"He that cometh to God, must believe...."

The first few words "I believe in God" are marvelously effective as a means of sanctifying our souls and of putting devils to rout, because these three words contain the acts of the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

The holy Rosary contains the mysteries of Jesus.

Faith is the only key which opens up these mysteries for us.

We must begin the Rosary by saying the Creed very devoutly.

The stronger our faith the more merit our Rosary will have.

St Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Pange lingua in the 13th century that “Faith will tell us Christ is present when our human senses fail”, that is, “Faith alone suffices”.

To pray the rosary with strong and constant faith, good intention and charity, is to be in search of God’s grace.

After listening to the word and focusing on the mystery, it is natural for the mind to be lifted up towards the Father. In each of his mysteries, Jesus always leads us to the Father.

God the Father listens more willingly to the Prayer that we have learned from His Son rather than those of our own making which have all our human limitations.

The eternal father will hear it because it is the prayer of His Son whom He always hears and we are his members.

In John 1:18, Jesus rests in the Father's bosom and is continually turned towards him. Jesus wants us to share in his intimacy with the Father, so that we can say with him: “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). 

By virtue of His relationship to the Father, Jesus makes us brothers and sisters of Himself and of one another, communicating to us the Spirit of Love for God and our neighbour, and heaven our homeland and heritage, freeing us from attachment to the things of this world.

The Our Father makes meditation upon the mystery an ecclesial experience.

Christian contemplation points towards Trinitarian doxology.  Christ is the way that leads us to the Father in the Spirit. If we travel this way to the end, we encounter the mystery of the three Divine persons, to whom all praise, worship and thanksgiving are due. The Gloria, the high point of contemplation, should be given due prominence in the Rosary.

The glorification of the Trinity at the end of each decade, far from being a perfunctory conclusion, takes on its proper contemplative tone, raising the mind as it were to the heights of heaven and enabling us in some way to relive the experience of Tabor, a foretaste of the contemplation yet to come: “It is good for us to be here!” (Lk 9:33).

Next week our sharing at the Novena to our Mother of Perpetual Help will continue the theme of exploring the Rosary prayers through the contemplation of Mary.

The Origin of the Rosary as a Meditative Prayer

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

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, in our approach to the month of the Rosary in October, a weekly sharing has been presented on aspects of the Rosary.

Last week’s sharing illuminated a beautiful Ignatian way of meditating on the great mysteries of our salvation when we pray the Rosary. This week we shall detail a little background to the history of the Rosary.

The rosary evolved over a long period and from a variety of sources. Even before Christ’s time, stone pebbles, beads of wood and knots of rope had been used to count prayers by followers of other religions.  The use of repetitive prayer in the Church seems to have evolved among the desert monks. In the 4th century the prayer rope was used by the Desert Fathers to count repetitions of the Jesus prayer.  By the 5th century, the order of public prayers called the Liturgy of the Hours or Divine Office was established, to fulfil the Lord's command to pray without ceasing. The 150 psalms of the bible comprised the most important part of it and were chanted by the clergy and monks in monasteries.

Lay people took a liking to this beautiful and harmonious devotion but, as they could not read Latin and were unable to memorise the Psalms, they prayed the Pater Noster (Our Father) in place of the Psalms. Thus grew the practice of chanting 150 Our Fathers, using a string of beads to count them, dividing them into fifties. This chaplet or string of fifty beads came to be known as Paternoster cords or beads, to be repeated three times, as an alternative to the traditional longer strand of 150 beads.

When the Irish brought the devotion using Paternoster cords to Europe, the faithful had begun to recite the Angelic salutation (the first half of the Hail Mary), which took its place along the Creed and the Our Father as a standard prayer. In time, the 150 Hail Marys prayed became known as the Marian Psalter.

In the 12th and 13th Century, the Albigensian heresy ravaged Christendom in southern France.

St Dominic de Guzman was distressed at his lack of success in preaching to counter it and, in desperation, turned to the Mother of God for help.

By tradition, she appeared to him in 1214 and told him to use her Psalter in conjunction with his preaching of the mysteries of our salvation.

St Dominic eventually succeeded in winning over the people back to their Christian faith, attributed to the intercession of Our Lady.

Now we know the number of prayers and the method of counting them, let us see what the prayers contained. In the 12th century, there developed two main streams. One contained the Marian Psalter, or 150 Hail Marys with an Our Father preceding each decade. The other was the “Ave Psalm Psalter”.

The Ave Psalm Psalter consisted of 150 rhymed stanzas, each beginning with the word Ave, each paraphrasing a theme from its corresponding Psalm, with an example shown here from Psalm 6.

The insertion of a series of scenes from Christ’s life into a traditional litany of praise to the Virgin was first found in an early 14th century Marian Psalter. Although addressed to Mary, the stanzas promoted meditation on the life, passion, death and resurrection of Christ.

The widespread acceptance of the rosary as a prayer of devotion was developed two hundred and fifty years after Dominic by Alanus de Rupe a learned Dominican priest and theologian. Through his devotion to the Blessed Mother, Alan reinstated the rosary in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The form of the Rosary we pray today is believed to be from his time, and is sometimes called the Dominican Rosary.

In 1569 Pope Pius V officially established the devotion to the rosary in its present form with 15 mysteries divided into Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious mysteries.

The Glory be and The Apostles Creed were added to the rosary prayer during the 17th century.

In 1917, Our Lady of Fatima asked that the Fatima Prayer be added to the rosary.

In 2002, Pope John Paul II introduced the five luminous mysteries as an optional addition.

In summary, each time we pray 50 Hail Marys our meditation on each mystery is in continuity with a prayer tradition that traces its practice to a worship of God, in thanksgiving for the Salvation achieved through Jesus Christ, that originated at least 1,700 years ago.

Next week our sharing at Novena to our Mother of Perpetual Help will explore the Benefits of praying the Rosary.

Editorial note:

The Albigensian heresy was a late echo of Gnostic and Manichaean heresies. It questioned the goodness of creation, teaching that all matter, including the human body, is evil. It denied the Resurrection and ultimately, the Incarnation. It also rejected the sacraments of the Catholic Church, the Old Testament, material possessions and the whole concept of the cross in Christian life, and condemned marriage. Pope Innocent III eventually ordered internal crusades against the Albengensians resulting in much shedding of blood. However, St Dominic took a more spiritual approach to this heresy. The poverty of the Dominicans challenged the austerities of the Albigensians whilst the mysteries of the Rosary helped re-establish the truth of the profound goodness of creation, which was confirmed by the Incarnation.