What Can We Not Acheive?

Most Catholics are familiar with the Rosary.  Virtually all have or have had one at some point in their lives.  But how often do they say it?  Have you ever thought: What is the Rosary?  How did it come into existence?  Why is it special?

The Rosary consists principally of three prayers, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory be.  These prayers have their origins in the earliest days of the Faith, even preceding the establishment of the Church.  The Our Father is the Lord’s own prayer, taught by Jesus to His disciples when they asked Him how they should pray. As St. Louis de Montfort wrote, this prayer “contains all the duties we owe to God, the acts of all the virtues and the petitions for all our spiritual and corporal needs.”

The Hail Mary, often referred to as the Angelic Salutation, is composed of two parts, one of praise, the other of petition.  It begins, “Hail [Mary], full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”  This is the greeting the Archangel Gabriel used when asking Mary to be the Mother of Our Lord.   It is followed by the words, “Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,” said by Elizabeth, a few weeks later, when Mary came to visit her.  Imagine, every time you say the Hail Mary, you repeat the words of God’s personal angelic messenger and of the divinely-inspired mother of John the Baptist, of whom Jesus said, “among those born of women, no one is greater than John.”

As the prayer evolved, the couplet of praise was joined to a statement of recognition and petition.  At the beginning of the fifth century, Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, taught that Mary was the mother only of Christ’s human nature and not His divine.  The Council of Ephesus, in 431, held this to be erroneous, declared that Mary was Theotokos, the Mother of God, and decreed that Catholics should say the prayer, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

As devotion to the Blessed Mother grew in the eleventh century, the Angelic Salutation was prayed repetitively, often 50, 100 or 150 times, with a genuflection after each utterance.  When any prayer or reverential act is repeated frequently, a physical means for keeping count is easier than a mental one.  Hence, people began using pebbles, knots on a cord, notches in wood, and even discs of bone strung together to keep count.  Thus, the bead system used today began to emerge.

In the early stages of monastic development, the monks often said the entire 150 psalms of David for their deceased brethren.  The short prayer “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost,” which appears to have originated in the fourth century, was said at the end of each psalm to Christianize it.  The words “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end” were added in stages, until the prayer assumed its current form in the seventh century.

Tradition attributes the present form of the Rosary to St. Dominic.  The Church at the time was being split by the heretical doctrines of the Albegensians, who held that two opposing principles or forces existed in the world, one was the source of the spiritual and all good, the other of the material and all evil.  St. Dominic was preaching against the heresy, but with little effect.  Then, in 1214, according to Blessed Alan de la Roche, Our Lady appeared and said, “Dear Dominic, do you know which weapon the Blessed Trinity wants to use to reform the world?”  When Dominic had no answer, she continued, “[I]n this kind of warfare, the principal weapon has always been the Angelic Psalter,” that is, the Rosary.  Dominic began to preach about and say the Rosary and had great success.  He also established the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary to encourage others to say it.

The fervor of the people for the Rosary, however, waned with time.  Then, Our Lady asked Alan de la Roche, a Dominican Friar and eminent theologian and preacher, to revive the Confraternity, a work he undertook in 1460.  When he died fifteen years later, Blessed Alan had enrolled over 100,000 people into the Confraternity.

The Creed, which was added to the Rosary in the early 17^th century, is a summary of the principal Christian truths.  It begins with the words “I believe in God.”  This act of faith is the first and essential step in leading a Christian life.  Once we believe, we can strive to know God, to love Him, and to trust in Him, so that we can gain the reward of an eternity in the kingdom of heaven.  The Apostles Creed has its origin in the early days of the Church, perhaps as one tradition holds, being composed by the Apostles themselves on the first Pentecost.

In 1917, when Our Lady appeared at Fatima, she asked that after each mystery people add the words, “O Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who have most need of your mercy.”

The Rosary incorporates two types of prayer, vocal and mental.  The vocal prayer is the repetition of the Hail Mary, divided into groups of ten, each preceded by the Our Father and ended with a Glory be.  The mental portion is the contemplation on the life and glory of Our Lord and His Mother.  The original 15 decades, in which the 150 Hail Marys paralleled the 150 psalms, focused on Our Lord’s birth, childhood, passion, death and resurrection.  They were expanded by Pope John Paul II to 20 decades to include more of Our Lord’s public life.

What a beautiful set of prayers is the Rosary, prayers that date back to the first days of our Faith given to us in the words of our Lord, the Archangel Gabriel, early ascetics and bishops, possibly the Apostles under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and the Blessed Mother herself.  If we say it devoutly and often, how can our heavenly Mother and her Son not respond to our petitions.

A slightly modified version of this article appeared in numerous publications of the Knights of Columbus in Maryland.  For further information, contact the author at