Holy Rosary

In 1883, Pope Leo XIII officially dedicated the month of October to the Holy Rosary, one of the best known of all Catholic devotions. October includes the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on October 7. According to tradition, St Dominic instituted the Rosary, having received it from the Virgin Mary herself. This is not true because the first evidence of the rosary was not until the mid-1400s when it was promoted by a Dominican as ‘Our Lady’s Psalter’. This name gives us a clue to its origin. In Medieval monasteries, the monks regularly prayed the 150 psalms as part of the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours. The lay monks and devout lay persons, who did not know Latin and who could not read, would say the Lord’s Prayer instead of each psalm – 150 of them – counting them on a ring of beads known as the crown or "corona". The use of beads or knotted ropes to count large numbers of prayers comes from the earliest days of Christianity. Since the twelfth century, the “Hail Mary” has been a basic prayer to be learned by all and recited frequently. The 150 Hail Marys were divided into groups of ten, or ‘decades’, and the decades grouped into three lots of five. Each decade was assigned a meditation mystery - Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious - and separated by a Glory Be and an Our Father. Each of the five decades in a group was assigned a particular event within, or aspect of, that mystery. This pattern of 150 Hail Marys paralleling the 150 psalms of the Liturgy of the Hours was clouded when Pope John Paul II introduced an additional set of meditations – the Luminous Mysteries. They are best regarded as an alternative set so that the connection with the 150 psalms is not lost. The rosary is loved as the ‘Psalter of the Poor’ and all Catholics should be able to join in praying it by memory from the heart. Elizabeth Harrington