Among the devotions to Mary, over the years, one clearly stands out: the Holy Rosary, the pious exercise par excellence in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God. We take advantage of this communication space to tell you the story of the Rosary. In ancient times, the Romans and Greeks used to crown the statues representing their gods with roses as a symbol of the offering of their hearts. The word rosary means "crown of roses."
Among the devotions to Mary, over the years, one clearly stands out: the Holy Rosary, the pious exercise par excellence in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God. We tell you the story of the Rosary. In ancient times, the Romans and Greeks used to crown the statues representing their gods with roses as a symbol of the offering of their hearts. The word rosary means "crown of roses."
Following this tradition, the Christian women who were led to martyrdom by the Romans, marched through the Colosseum dressed in their most colorful clothes and with their heads adorned with crowns of roses, as a symbol of joy and the surrender of their hearts when going to meeting of God. At night, the Christians collected their crowns and for each rose, they recited a prayer or a psalm for the eternal repose of the souls of the martyrs.
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT
In the Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary was greeted with the title of rose, a symbol of joy. The blessed Hermann will say to her: “Rejoice, You, beauty itself. / I say to you: Rose, Rose", and in a medieval French manuscript it reads: "when the beautiful rose Mary begins to bloom, the winter of our tribulations fades and the summer of eternal joy begins to shine." Images of the Virgin are decorated with a "crown of roses" and Mary is sung as a "garden of roses" (in medieval Latin rosarium); This explains the etymology of the name that has reached our days.
At that time, those who did not know how to recite the 150 psalms of the Divine Office replaced them with 150 Hail Marys, accompanied by genuflections, using grains threaded by tens or knots tied on a rope to count them. At the same time, the life of the Virgin was meditated on and preached. In the S. XIII, in England, the Cistercian abbot Étienne de Sallai wrote some meditations in which 15 joys of Our Lady appear, ending each of them with a Hail Mary.
Without entering into a detailed critical-historical discussion about the details of the ultimate origin of the Rosary in its current structure, we can affirm that Saint Domingo de Guzmán is, without a doubt, the man who in his time contributed most to the formation of the Rosary and its propagation. , not without inspiration from Saint Mary the Virgin. The reason was the spread of the Albigensian heresy, which he fought, "not with force of arms, but with the deepest faith in the devotion of the Holy Rosary, which he was the first to propagate, and which he carried personally and through his children." to the four corners of the world..." (Leo XIII, Enc. Supremi apostolatus, Sept. 1, 1883).
At the end of the s. XV the Dominicans Alain de la Rochelle in Flanders, Santiago de Sprenger and Félix Fabre in Cologne, give the Rosary a structure similar to that of today: five or fifteen mysteries are prayed, each composed of ten Hail Marys. The contemplation of the mysteries is structured, which are divided into joyful, painful and glorious, thus reviewing in the weekly cycle the central events of the life of Jesus and Mary, as in a compendium of the liturgical year and the entire Gospel. Finally, the prayer of the litanies is set, whose origin in the Church is very ancient.
Devotion to the Rosary acquired a notable boost in the time of Leo XIII, adding the invocation "Queen of the Most Holy Rosary" to the Laurentian litanies.
In recent times, the miraculous events of Lourdes and Fatima have contributed in a special way to the foundation and propagation of this Marian devotion: "the Blessed Virgin herself, in our times, wanted to insistently recommend this practice when she appeared in the grotto of Lourdes and taught that young woman how to pray the Rosary.
January 26, 2022
STRUCTURE
The typical and plenary form of praying the Rosary, with 150 Hail Marys, has been distributed in three cycles of mysteries, joyful, painful and glorious throughout the week, giving rise to the usual form of praying five decades of Hail Marys, contemplating five daily mysteries (custom usually assigns the glorious ones to Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday; the joyful ones to Monday and Thursday and the sorrowful ones to Tuesday and Friday), with the Laurentian litanies being prayed at the end of the five mysteries. John Paul II added the cycle of luminous mysteries on Thursdays.
The three groups of mysteries remind us of the three great mysteries of salvation. The mystery of the Incarnation is evoked for us by the joys of the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity of the Lord, his Presentation in the temple and the Purification of his Mother and, finally, his meeting among the doctors in the Temple. The mystery of the Redemption is represented by the various moments of the Passion: the prayer and agony in the garden of Gethsemane, the flagellation, the crowning with thorns, the journey to Calvary with the Cross on his back and the crucifixion. The mystery of eternal life is evoked by the Resurrection of the Lord, his Ascension, Pentecost, the Assumption of Mary and her Coronation as Queen. «The whole Creed then passes before our eyes, not in an abstract way, with dogmatic formulas, but in a concrete way in the life of Christ, who descends to us and ascends to his Father to lead us to Him. It is the whole Christian dogma, in all its depth and splendor, so that we can in this way and every day, understand it, savor it and feed our soul with it" (R. Garrigou-Lagrange, The Mother of the Savior and our inner life, 3 ed. Buenos Aires 1954, 261).
John Paul II included in the recitation of the Rosary the Mysteries of Light, which includes several scenes from the life of Jesus that remained to be considered: Baptism, the Wedding at Cana, the Announcement of the Kingdom, the Transfiguration and the institution of the Eucharist.
January 26, 2022
INSTITUTION OF THE FEAST OF THE HOLY ROSARY
On October 7, 1571, the naval battle of Lepanto took place, in which the Christians defeated the Turks. The Christians knew that if they lost this battle, their religion could be endangered and for this reason they trusted in God's help through the intercession of the Holy Virgin. Pope Saint Pius V asked Christians to pray the rosary for the fleet.
Days later messengers arrived with the official news of the Christian triumph. Later, he instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victories on October 7.
A year later, Gregory XIII changed the name of the festival to Our Lady of the Rosary and determined that it be celebrated on the first Sunday of October (the day on which the battle had been won). Currently the feast of the Rosary is celebrated on October 7 and some Dominicans continue to celebrate it on the first Sunday of the month.
