The Rosary a Mental Prayer

We have said already that meditation on the mysteries of the Rosary is an essential condition for gaining the many Indulgences granted by successive pontiffs to this venerable Devotion. What is this but to repeat in other words that the Rosary, to be the Rosary, must be a mental prayer? If it ceases to be a mental prayer, it fails to be the Rosary. It may be a prayer—a vocal prayer—it is not the Rosary.

Pope Benedict XIII., in confirming the Indulgences granted by his predecessors to the members of the Rosary Confraternity, did so on condition of their "accustoming themselves to meditate upon the Most Holy Mysteries of our redemption according to the object of the institution of the Rosary" (Pretiosus, May 26, 1727). In the form of blessing the beads, the priest prays that they may receive an abundance of grace who in using them "shall devoutly pray as they contemplate the Divine Mysteries." To put the matter beyond every shadow of a doubt Pope Leo XIII., in his recently published "Apostolic Constitution" for "the future ordering and governing" of the Rosary Confraternity, expressly lays down this law. "We hereby reiterate what the Apostolic See has previously decreed (S.C.I. August 13, 1726), namely, that the Meditations must be made on those Mysteries of Man's Redemption which have become by long use known as 'the Mysteries of the Rosary,' and to meditation on these alone are the Indulgences attached" (N. xiii.)

"In all thy ways think on Him, and he will direct thy steps" is the wise advice of one of the wisest of men, whose wisdom came from the All-wise (Prov. iii. 6). Under the Mosaic Dispensation God gave, what to us seems a curious command to His people, with a view of lifting up their minds to Him. "The Lord also said to Moses: Speak to the children of Israel, and thou shalt tell them to make to themselves fringes in the corners of their garments, putting in them ribbons of blue. That when they shall see them, they may remember all the commandments of the Lord, and not follow their own thoughts and eyes, going astray after divers things" (Numb. xv. 37-39). And truly, if we can at times avoid following our "own thoughts and eyes, and going astray after divers things" of earth, if, with the Psalmist we can say: "Mine eyes have looked unto Thee before the morning, that I might think upon Thy words" (cxviii. 148), "I have lifted up mine eyes unto the hills from whence my help shall come" (cxx. 1), "To Thee have I lifted up mine eyes, who dwellest in the heavens" (cxxii. 1), we shall not wander far from God in the practice of our life.

It is they who do not lift up the eyes of the soul to the hills, to Him who dwells in the heavens, who fail to reach the hills and see not Him who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. They fall, instead, upon the plains, they grovel on earth, they are carnal-minded and worldly, they are both in the world and of the world, and so, not being "clean of heart," they do not "see God." If Adam in the hour of his strife had thought, or, in Scripture language, had "lifted up his eyes," how different a world this might have been! We might have escaped the "labour and toil," the "thorns and thistles," and the multiplied "sorrows" of which we read in Genesis, and of which we experience the reality in our daily lives. If in the days when the Ark was a-building the people would have listened to the preaching of Noe, and have lifted up their thoughts to heaven, these "mighty men of old, men of renown," might have been spared, and the "waters of the great flood" might never have fallen upon the earth, and "all things upon the earth" might never have been "consumed." If the people of Sodom and Gomorrah and the wicked cities, had only meditated upon God's eternal law of justice and truth, "the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah" would not have been "multiplied," their "sin" would not have "become exceedingly grievous," Abraham would not have seen "the ashes rise up from the earth as the smoke of a furnace" and "the cities of that country destroyed." If in our Lord's lifetime, when He spoke, the Scribes and Pharisees had only thought upon His words and let them bear fruit in their lives, they would never have heard that terrible word of denunciation, of only two letters indeed, but of such deep import: "Wo." If in after days men would but have "entered into themselves and meditated upon the love of God" instead of following their "own thoughts and eyes and going astray after divers things," heresies and heretics would not have sought to tear the seamless robe of Christ, and sin would not have "crucified Him anew."

"With desolation is all the land made desolate, because there is no one that considereth in his heart" (Jer. xii. 11), is an old-world word, but it is as true in the new world of to-day as in the old one of nearly three thousand years ago. It is as true nineteen hundred years after Christ's coming, as it was six hundred years before He came. The plaint of the ancient seer was the clarion note of distress and warning sounded by the early Christian preacher, later by middle-age saint, and now by the twentieth-century apostle. "Therefore their way shall be as a slippery way in the dark; for they shall be driven on and fall therein" (Jer. xxiii. 12).

Here was the meaning of the institution of the Rosary. "Thou shalt preach this Devotion," Our Lady said to her chosen Apostle, "and thou wilt obtain an abundant harvest of souls." The Rosary had to lead men to think, to lift up their eyes to the hills, to Him "who dwells in the heavens." The beads, like the fringes of Israel's garments holding ribbons of blue, were intended for a reminder to men of the ways of God. The Albigensian heresy was based upon errors which were not only un-Christian but anti-Christian, and which aimed at the very existence of Christianity and the subversion of the Christian law; and the Albigensian heresy was infecting some of the fairest provinces in Christendom. Christianity had to be re-preached. The Christian virtues had to be re-taught. Christ Himself had to be re-born in the minds and hearts, in the lives and ways of so-called Christians. "There hath stood one in the midst of you whom you know not," S. John the Baptist might have cried out in Languedoc, in Toulouse, in the north of Italy, and the south of France, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as he cried out in "the country about the Jordan," in the days of Our Lord Himself. The mission of the Rosary was to make men know Him, to make them think about Him, to make them meditate upon His life, His ways, His virtues. From knowing Christ, the Rosary had to teach them to love Him. "In my meditation a fire breaks out" (Ps. xxxviii. 4). Then from loving Him, they had to be brought, in the expressive word of S. Paul, "to put on Christ," to lead Christ-like lives. This, in a word, was the Apostolate of the Rosary.