The Importance of the Family Rosary
& The Power of the Rosary
& The Power of the Rosary
The Importance of the Family Rosary
This article is taken from the booklet "Our Glorious Faith
and How To Lose It" written by
Fr. Hugh Thwaites, S.J. It contains different stories of how we can lose
our faith but this paper will deal only with the Holy Rosary. Fr. Thwaites'
words on this subject are as follows:
Without delay now, I want to talk about my theme. It seems to me that
a principal cause of the loss of faith is the dropping off in the practice
of the family rosary.
In Austria, after World War II, there was a complete collapse of vocations.
One year, apparently, no one at all entered the seminaries. So the bishops
held a synod, to find out how it could be that this had happened. The conclusion
they reached was that the war had so disrupted family life that the centuries-old
practice of the rosary in the home had stopped, and had just not started
up again. This is my experience, too; when the rosary goes, the faith soon
collapses.
I remember someone telling me of a friend of his, a great Catholic,
the pillar of the parish, whose children had all lapsed, one after the
other. They had all fallen away from the sacraments and from attending
Mass. So I said to him, "I wouldn't mind betting that your friend
had been brought up to recite the family rosary when he was a boy, and
that his children haven't." The next time I saw him, he said that
this was indeed true. His friend had recited the family rosary at home
when he was a boy, and when he had got married and started his own family
they all said the rosary. But then, one evening when they were about to
start the rosary, one of the children switched on the television, and that
was that. The custom of the family rosary was dropped, and in due course,
they gave up the practice of the faith.
After this life, that one unrebuked action will be seen to have affected
the eternity of many people. God sent His Mother to Fatima to tell us that
we had to say the rosary every day. There were no other prayers She asked
us to say. Accordingly, we should do what She asked.
A layman I met once who did not say his rosary told me that he read
the breviary every day. That is fine. It is what priests have to do. It
is the prayer of the Church. So in a way it is better than the rosary.
But it is not what Our Lady asked for. She asked for the rosary. If a mother
sends her child to the shop for a bottle of milk, and he comes back instead
with ice cream, is she pleased? In a way, ice cream is better than milk,
but it is not what she asked for.
In that most holy home at Nazareth, do you think that Our Lady had
to ask for anything twice? If we want in any way to be like Jesus, we must
do what His Mother asks. If we do not, can we expect things to go right?
We cannot with impunity disobey the Mother of God. She knows better than
we the dangers of this spiritual warfare. She sees more clearly than we
do the dangers that beset us. She warns us: You must say your rosary every
day.
If the garage mechanic warns you that your car needs repairing or else
it will break down, surely you would heed that warning. If the gas gauge
warns you that you need more gas, do you do nothing about it? And if Our
Lady comes to Fatima and tells us, not just once but six times, that we
must say the rosary every day, do we disregard that warning? If we do,
we have only ourselves to blame when we find that our children have lapsed
from the faith.
I know that Fatima is only a private revelation (It isnt ties in with Apocalypse), but nevertheless the
Church has endorsed it, and that makes it rash for us to disregard it.
If the Church informs us that Our Lady really did come to Fatima and tell
us these things, then we must harken to her words. It really seems to me
that those Catholics who do not take Fatima seriously and say the rosary
every day in their homes are very akin to the Jews who laughed at Jeremiah.
If God sends us His prophets and we do not take them seriously – well,
we have the whole of the Old Testament to tell us what happens as a result.
But at Fatima, God sent us, not His prophets, but His Immaculate Mother.
So I think that the abandonment of the family rosary is a main reason
why so many Catholics have lost the faith. It seems to me that the Church
of the future is going to consist solely of those families who have been
faithful to the rosary. But there will be vast numbers of people whose
families used to be Catholic.
In my work of going round visiting homes, I have seen this conclusion
borne out time and again. Homes can be transformed by starting the recitation
of the daily rosary. I remember a woman telling me that she could not thank
me enough for having nagged her into starting it; it had united her family
as never before. And I remember another home where I called. There was
a strange tension there: the children were silent and the wife seemed withdrawn,
but the husband was willing to start the family rosary. When I called back
again a couple of months later, the atmosphere was quite different. The
children were chatty and the wife was friendly, and the husband walked
down the road with me afterwards and said how amazing it was that the home
was so much happier.
One reason, I think, why the daily rosary makes for a happy home, is
this. From what some possessed people have said, and from what some of
the saints have said, it seems certain that demons fear the rosary. It
makes their hair stand on end, so to speak. Holy water certainly drives
them out, but they come back again. The daily rosary drives them out and
keeps them out. It is rather like living in an old house where there are
mice everywhere. The only way to get rid of them is to bring cats. If you
get a couple of cats, after a week or two there simply will not be any
more mice. Mice fear the very smell of cats. And in a home where the rosary
is said every day, after a time the demons realize they are impotent in
front of Our Lady, and go elsewhere.
This must be one reason why, as they say, "the family that prays
together stays together." In that home, utterly free of evil spirits,
there is an atmosphere one does not find outside. In a demon-infested city
like London, where I live, such a home is an oasis of God's grace, and
people find a comfort and peace there which they enjoy greatly. We human
beings are not meant to live in the company of demons, but with God and
with the angels and saints in heaven.
So, as I see it, in this effort we are making to keep the faith and
pass it on, the practice of the rosary is absolutely indispensable. Whatever
else a person may do, even though they go to Mass every day, they still
need to say the rosary in their home. It is the medicine our Mother has
told us to take, to keep our faith strong and healthy.
The Power of the Rosary
The most holy Virgin in these last times in which
we live has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the Rosary to such
an extent that there is no problem, no matter how difficult it is,
whether temporal or, above all, spiritual, in the personal life of each
one of us, of our families, of the families of the world, or of the
religious communities, or even of the life of peoples and nations, that
cannot be solved by the Rosary. There is no problem, I tell you, no
matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the
holy Rosary. With the holy Rosary, we will save ourselves; we will
sanctify ourselves; we will console our Lord, and obtain the salvation
of many souls.
Conversation between Sr. Lucy of Fatima and Fr. Fuentes, Dec. 26, 1957
"The Rosary is a powerful weapon to put the
demons to flight and to keep oneself from sin…If you desire peace in
your hearts, in your homes, and in your country, assemble each evening
to recite the Rosary. Let not even one day pass without saying it, no
matter how burdened you may be with many cares and labors."
Pope Pius XI
"Among all the devotions approved by the Church, none has been so favored by so many miracles as the Rosary devotion."
Pope Pius IX
"The Rosary is the most excellent form of
prayer and the most efficacious means of attaining eternal life. It is
the remedy for all our evils, the root of all our blessings. There is no
more excellent way of praying."
Pope Leo XIII
St. Dominic prayed to Our Lady that she
would force the devils who possessed a man to reveal the truth about
devotion to her. The devils were forced by Our Lady to reveal: "Now that
we are forced to speak we must also tell you this: Nobody who
perseveres in saying the Rosary will be damned, because she obtains for
her servants the grace of true contrition for their sins and by means of
this they obtain God's forgiveness and mercy."
Battle of Lepanto, 1571 - On Sunday,
October 7, the Christian and Turkish fleets met in Lepanto Gulf, off the
coast of Greece. The bitter battle finished with a brilliant victory of
the Christians who where vastly outnumbered. That very evening Pope St.
Pius V had at Rome a clear knowledge of this success. The same
afternoon, the Confraternities of the Rosary, particularly in Rome, had
marched through the streets in procession reciting the Rosary. This
victory put an end to the naval power of the Turks and saved Christian
Europe. To this day this victory has been attributed to the praying of
the Rosary. The feast of “The Most Holy Rosary” is celebrated on October
7 now and the month of October is dedicated to the Most Holy Rosary.
Rosary Miracle at Hiroshima - August
6th, 1945
There was a home eight blocks (about 1 kilometer) from where the A-Bomb
went off in Hiroshima Japan. This home had a church attached to it which
was completely destroyed, but the home survived, and so did the eight
German Jesuit missionaries who prayed the rosary in that house
faithfully every day. These men were missionaries to the Japanese
people, they were non-military, but because Germany and Japan were
allies during WWII they were permitted to live and minister within Japan
during the war. Not only did they all survive with (at most)
relatively minor injuries, but they all lived well past that awful day
with no radiation sickness, no loss of hearing, or any other visible
long term defects or maladies. Naturally, they were interviewed
numerous times (Fr. Schiffer, a survivor, said over 200 times) by
scientists and health care people about their remarkable experience and
they say "we believe that we survived because we were living the message
of Fatima. We lived and prayed the rosary daily in that home." Of
course the secular scientists are speechless and incredulous at this
explanation - and they are sure there is some "real" explanation - but
at the same time over 55 years later the scientists are still absolutely
bamboozled when it comes to finding a plausible scenario to explain the
missionaries’ unique escape from the hellish power of that bomb.
Russians Pullout of Austria, 1948 -
After World War ll, the Allies turned over Catholic Austria to communist
Russia. For three years the Austrian people endured this tyranny. Then,
a Franciscan priest, Father Petrus, remembered how the Christians
although greatly outnumbered had defeated the Turks at the Battle of
Lepanto through the Rosary, and he launched a Rosary crusade. Through it
70,000 people, one tenth of the Austrian population, pledged to say the
Rosary daily for the Soviets to leave their country. Austria was
valuable to the Russians because of its strategic location, rich mineral
deposits and oil reserves. Yet on May 13, 1955, the anniversary of the
first apparition of Our Lady at Fatima, the Russians signed the
agreement to leave Austria, and they did so without one person being
killed and without one shot being fired. It is the only time that the
militant atheistic forces of Marxism have ever peacefully left a country
in which they held power.
Military strategists and historians are baffled as to why the Russians
pulled out. But we are not - it was the power of the Rosary.
The Country That Saved Itself - Brazil 1962
- In 1962 there was a looming threat of communist takeover in Brazil. A
woman there named Dona Amelia Bastos was known to have formed a Rosary
rally among the Brazilian women there to do their part in opposing the
looming threat. Their goal was simply to pray the Rosary in large groups
asking the Virgin Mary for help in opposing the Communist takeover
which the President of Brazil was leaning toward at the time. In Belo
Horizonte 20,000 women reciting the rosary aloud broke up a Communist
rally. In Sao Paulo, 600,000 women praying the rosary in one of the most
moving demonstrations in Brazilian history, caused the President of
Brazil to flee the country and not a single death was encountered,
sparing the country from Communist takeover.
The above accounts are just a few of the countless examples of
The Power of the Rosary!
Complete Holy Rosary in form of Gregorian chants