Rosary and the Family

"Dear Children! You have helped me along by your prayers to realize my plans. Keep on praying that my plan may be completely realized. I request the families of the parish to pray the Family Rosary. Thank you for having responded to my call" (Our Lady of Medjugorje, September 27, 1984).

The call to pray the Rosary is the principal form of prayer requested by the Blessed Mother, not only in the message of Medjugorje but in the overall Marian message to the modern world. I want to discuss this favored Marian prayer under three categories. First of all, I will discuss briefly the Rosary in this general Marian call to the modern world. Secondly, I will discuss a little bit of the origins, the history, and the nature of the Rosary. What is this prayer of the Rosary that Our Lady has called us to so regularly? Thirdly, and most importantly for our purposes, I want to show how these two come together in the crucial Marian call to pray the Family Rosary. This is especially true in reading some of the recent interviews of the visionaries. They present the Rosary, especially the family praying of the Rosary, right after the general call to prayer and fasting as the most efficacious means of repelling Satan and of nurturing spiritual growth. It is absolutely fundamental.

What I'm going to suggest is that if there is any ability to incorporate the message of Medjugorje as families, and if one is not clear where to begin, then I would strongly suggest starting with the Family Rosary. This is because no other single call (and again, it's not more efficacious than the objective call of Mass—we're presupposing the Sunday obligation of Mass) incorporates so much of what the Madonna is asking in terms of families praying together as families.

Call to Rosary in the Marian Era

Let me trace a little bit of the persistent historic Marian call to daily pray the Rosary daily.

Lourdes

Let's begin a brief summary with the Marian apparitions at Lourdes in 1858. Here in this little French mountain village to the one visionary, Bernadette Soubirous, Our Lady appeared under the title of the Immaculate Conception. What was the overall message of Lourdes in 1858? The overall message was prayer and penance to God for the conversion of sinners. There were very few recorded messages that "Aquero"—the French dialectical word that Bernadette uses for Mary which means literally, "that one"—delivered at Lourdes. Our Lady began the call to pray the Rosary at Lourdes by example. We'll see how this example gets more explicit at Fatima and also at Medjugorje.

What can we say specifically about the Rosary from the apparitions at Lourdes? First of all, Our Lady is always holding Rosary beads in her hands during the apparitions and is in fact praying the Rosary. In one early apparition account, the Blessed Virgin's lips were moving silently while the Rosary beads were passing through her fingers. Bernadette reported that she received an inner impulse to reach into her packet and get her Rosary beads and begin to pray. It's very clear in the account that it's an interior impulse that directs Bernadette to reach in her pocket for her Rosary. She responded to the interior call and began to pray. Also at Lourdes, Bernadette spiritually prepared for her later apparitions by the recitation of the Rosary. As we'll see, this pattern will continue through all three of the principal apparitions of this Marian Age.

The basic message of Lourdes is prayer and penance. Our Lady said a few times, "pray for the sinners" and "do penance for the sinners." But it is not a very developed message. It's very succinct and very much to the point. But implicitly we have the clear call of the Rosary, and it is significant that Our Lady began the call for us to pray the Rosary by her own example, then followed by the example of Bernadette to the townspeople.

Fatima

Now we move to another mountain town. We should note with any honest investigation of Marian apparitions that Our Lady seems drawn to mountain towns! Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje. This seems to be in some aspect a way to protect the integrity of the message. It seems that the more simple and less educated the conveyor, the better the chance of Our Lady getting her message across as opposed to having the thoughts of the human recipient interfere. To my knowledge there has never been an authentic private revelation given to a theologian. Why? Because the theologian would classify it, interpret it; it would be qualified according to St. Augustine and St. Thomas, and expounded upon, etc. And then it becomes our message, not hers. So Our Lady often picks those we would consider socially unsophisticated and even rudimentary in terms of education. We know that St. Bernadette did not pass her First Communion exam the first time she took it, which is not necessarily a sign of a lack of intelligence but a lack of schooling.

In 1917 at Fatima, the Blessed Mother comes to us under a new title, Our Lady of the Rosary. The visionaries at Fatima, Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta, had the daily practice of praying the Rosary. After praying the Rosary on that given day of May 13th, Our Lady appeared to them. In that first apparition, Our Lady gave the words that she would repeat several times over the course of the apparitions: "Pray the Rosary every day in order to obtain peace for the world." What we had at Lourdes implicitly, we now have explicitly at Fatima. Pray the Rosary every day for what intention? For the intention of peace. And again we're going to see even more development between a global call of peace at Fatima and specifying the interior peace of Christ from which global peace must come at Medjugorje.

It's also interesting in terms of the power of the Rosary to note what Lucia asked the Virgin in that first apparition. The Blessed Mother had reported to Lucia that she and Jacinta would go to Heaven. Lucia then asked about Francisco? Our Lady answered: "Yes, Francisco, too, will go to Heaven, but first he will have to pray many Rosaries." This gives us an idea of the incredible efficacy of this Rosary prayer. The one spiritual instrument she specifically mentioned that would be necessary for Francisco's salvation was the Rosary.

In the second Fatima apparition on June 13, 1917, the Blessed Mother instructed the children to recite what is today known as the "Fatima prayer" to be prayed at the end of each decade of the Rosary. Many are not aware that the prayer, "O my 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" comes from Fatima. How appropriate is the theological meaning of this prayer petition that seeks to redirect all souls to Heaven, coupled with a prayer of intercession for those in the greatest need.

It is said in the devotion to Divine Mercy that God reserves His greatest mercy for the greatest sinners. Sometimes this can cause us a little distress in the sense that most of us are not the greatest sinners. We all do our strong share of sinning without any question, but most of us are not the greatest sinners. Why do we miss out on our Lord's greatest mercy? Because it's with the greatest sinners that we can see the exercise of God's greatest mercy. We can see his mercy expanding not just from the domain of the essence of human sin but to the epitome of human sin, which gives us a better idea of the infinite nature of the mercy of God. So, too, in the message of Fatima, we have the prayer to extend God's mercy to those in special need, in the greatest need of His infinite mercy, which Pope John Paul II inferred is God's greatest attribute!

In the third Fatima apparition on July 13th, we have a very profound revelation. We have the vision of Hell (which has also taken place at Medjugorje to reaffirm the reality of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory as the three possible states of afterlife). The brief time we have on earth (and really it is brief compared to the eternal ramifications) is for choosing where we want to be eternally. It is comparable to this example. Let's say we have three minutes to choose where we want to be for the next twenty-four hours. We don't consider that much time, but we've got to make the choice, and it will determine our destiny for the rest of our day. This is comparable to our having sixty or seventy or eighty years on earth in which time we must make a choice that has an eternal ramification: Heaven or Hell. The relationship of sixty years to eternity doesn't compare to the relationship of three minutes to a day. That's how vital, how far-reaching the effects of our choices in this life are. So Our Lady's revelation of these realities is a confirmation of the results of our human freedom, for better or for worse.

After the vision of Hell, in the July apparitions, we then had a prophecy that the Holy Father would suffer much. And it is no coincidence that on May 13th in 1981, on the anniversary of the first apparition of Fatima some sixty-four years later, Pope John Paul II was shot in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. He went to Fatima after that shooting to give thanks to the Blessed Mother because he attributed his rescue from death to her intercession. Our Lady then said at this third apparition that if people do not begin to pray and cease offending God, there would be a second world war. This was a conditional world war that in fact took place because we did not comply with the call of the Blessed Mother and her petition for the daily Rosary. Our Lady then said: "Continue to say the Rosary every day in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary to obtain the peace of the world and the end of the war, for she alone will be able to help" (emphasis added).

This gets to the heart of sound Catholic doctrine regarding the Virgin Mary. Our Lady has a preeminence in the order of intercession. No one can intercede like the Blessed Mother. Why? Because no one else gave flesh to the "Word made flesh." Can you imagine the incredible union between Jesus and Mary even before the birth of Jesus? Our Lady gave her own flesh and blood to God in those nine months of gestation. It's like having the Eucharist in us uninterruptedly for nine months, but more! No one else, to use a classical theological formulation, had an "intrinsic relationship with the Hypostatic Union," an interior role in God, the Second Person of the Trinity, becoming man and redeeming the world. And so, appropriately, no one has the power of intercession like this woman. And this woman calls us to the Rosary by example; at Fatima it is a very explicit and, in fact, an emphatic call to pray the Rosary daily for peace in the world.

Medjugorje

Now, in our present age, under the title of Mary, Queen of Peace, we have what we might call the full flowering of this same Mother's call to the modern world to pray daily the Rosary at Medjugorje. Let me begin with the June 25th anniversary message of 1985 in which Our Lady in a very straightforward Marian manner said: "I invite you to call on everyone to pray the Rosary. With the Rosary you shall overcome all the adversities which Satan is trying to inflict on the Catholic Church." Mirjana on this same day asked the Blessed Mother, "What do you wish to say to the priests?" Our Lady responded: "All you priests pray the Rosary, give time to the Rosary."

In a very dramatic way, the Blessed Mother is posing this same Marian prayer, the Rosary, as a principal means not only of personal conversion, but also as protection against the attacks of Satan on the Church. There is no question that Satan exists and is presently attacking the Body of Christ. And Mary, as Mother of the Body of the Christ, calls us to protect ourselves. In the Middle Ages, Our Lady was referred to as the "neck" of the Mystical Body of Christ. It is not very poetic, but it gives us a concrete idea of her role. She connects the Head with the Body in the order of grace. And that is why in St. Louis Marie de Montfort's writings, to which Pope John Paul II called us to return, we witness the ongoing battle between the greatest creature and the most heinous, between Mary and Satan, in a battle foreshadowed in Genesis from the beginning. It's going to be the Woman versus the serpent. And the Mother of the Body is telling us to protect ourselves with this Rosary prayer. The power of the Rosary against Satan is also spoken of in this August 1985 message a few months later:

Please note two insights from this message. First of all, the more we know of Satan and his cleverness, the worse it is for Satan. The more we think of Satan as an unreal cartoon character, the better it is for Satan. This is like Pope Pius XII's statement about the sin of this century, "The sin of this century is the loss of the sense of sin." If we don't know there is a battle, we're not going to be prepared for one. The more we know that there's a battle taking place the more Satan becomes active, because he knows that part of his ammunition is gone, that is, the ammunition of secrecy. And so Our Lady again calls us to the Rosary, our armor against Satan in today's battle against an active aggressor. With Rosaries in hand, we will conquer.