In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Our Lady, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary.
St. Joseph, St. Dominic, our patron saints and guardian angels.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
When Pope John Paul II issued his apostolic letter on the Holy Rosary back in 2003,
Blessed Pope John Paul II,
he said that the first rosary that ever was prayed,
were the ponderings of Our Lady's heart on all the words and actions of Christ
that we hear about in Sacred Scripture.
You know, in the Gospel of Luke, it says that after our Lord,
after she found him in the temple,
that she pondered his words in her heart.
After Simeon's prophecy about a sort of sorrow shall pierce your own heart too,
she pondered these words in her heart.
And Pope John Paul II is saying,
well, really, that's what the rosary is,
is Our Lady pondered these words and actions of her Son in her heart.
She meditated on them.
And that what we are asked to do by praying the Most Holy Rosary
is Our Lady has given us truly a meditation
that we can enter into on the ponderings of her heart.
If there's ever a co-redemptive prayer,
if there's a prayer that you might say is,
sacramental, that is co-redemptive,
you can look at the rosary, but what is it?
It really is, you know, she who was with the Redeemer.
And you enter into these mysteries by pondering these words and actions,
these events of salvation history,
the passion, death, resurrection, the public life of our Lord.
You enter in with Our Lady into the life of Christ,
and you can see them.
Through her eyes, if we enter into them in the proper manner,
proper spirit, and of course, mystically,
Our Lady is assisting us to enter into her heart
as she ponders the life of Christ,
as she's lived with him those 33 years on earth
and still remains now in heaven with her Son.
And we know that we can enter into,
this life of grace and really, you know,
what the mysteries of the rosary are trying to do are to make present to us
in a mystical way what we are partaking in,
you might say, at Mass, every time we come here,
you know, to enter into the passion, death, and resurrection of our Lord,
to truly,
allow him to do what sacred scripture says and,
you know, prophesied by the prophets of Old Testament,
that God wants to give us a new heart.
You know, it's the only kind of heart transplant that you can partake in,
is the mystical one.
You know, that our Lord, God wants to give us a new heart.
He wants to transform us, our hearts,
so that we truly have a heart like Christ and his mother.
And that can only come about through grace,
as we know, you know,
Saint Maximilian says that conversion can only come about through prayer.
And that's what the rosary is trying to do,
is to make our hearts like unto Christ.
And the first heart that was like unto his most perfectly was Our Lady's.
And so the only way we can, or the way,
one of the most perfect ways is to pray the rosary.
Many people find the rosary to be a drudgery,
they find it to be difficult, and so many don't go near it.
And yet Our Lady has asked us at Fatima,
when she came with that powerful message of conversion of the world,
the central message was, how did she address herself to us?
She said, I am Our Lady of the most, I'm Our Lady of the rosary.
And she told us to pray the rosary every day.
Now that seems, for some people,
that seems to be a great task,
but it doesn't take that much of our day to pray the rosary.
It ought to take, if we're praying it properly,
at least maybe a half hour, and that we don't rush through it.
But you know if we attempt to pray the rosary,
and we try, and that we are saying the rosary,
we are fulfilling a request of Our Lady
that's very essential for our world today.
Not just for,
us as individuals, but the whole
human race. Because Our Lady said, if we don't pray the rosary,
we won't have peace. And Sister Lucy
said, Our Lady wasn't just talking about World War I.
She was talking about the war that goes on and on every day
for the battle of souls, the spiritual battle. If we want
peace, if we want to overcome our enemies, then we
have to take Our Lady's message to heart and pray
the rosary every day. It's something that little children
obey their parents. And we look at all
those schemes that we have political leaders
put together for achieving peace in the world, and they are really
of no use. Because they don't start with the right
place. They don't start with the conversion of hearts.
They don't start with the moral
aspect. They don't start with the fact that we have to stop
sinning. We have to put God first in our lives.
And so, this is where the
rosary is really that stumbling block for the proud.
For the humble and the little ones, they will see the
truth and the beauty and the wisdom
of God in Our Lady's message at Fatima. Pray the rosary
every day.
When Sister Lucy wrote her memoirs of the messages of Fatima, calls from the
message of Fatima, she wrote in there that the rosary was a liturgical prayer.
And the theologian that the Vatican assigned to look at her writings got all
excited. Oh, what is she saying that the rosary is a liturgical prayer? Is she
saying something heretical? No. She was talking that what is the rosary
composed of? It's composed of meditating on the life of Christ, His passion,
death, and resurrection. What do we partake in when we come to Mass?
The passion, death, and resurrection. And what is the rosary
composed of? That glory be to the Father and to the Son. We say that
so many times, invoking the Trinity at Mass. It's imposed
of the angelic salutation, which we hear so much
and we hear so much this mystery of the
incarnation. Well, that's what we couldn't have the Mass without the incarnation.
It's composed of the Our Father. We say it at every Mass, the Our Father, the
prayer that Jesus taught us when His disciples said, Lord teach us to pray.
And so, Sister Lucy was saying, well, it's a liturgical prayer in the sense
that mystically it's the best kind of way to to make the Mass present through
your day in a mystical way that you can continue the Mass at home throughout the
week. If you're not able to go to Mass every
And she even said, the reason why Our Lady said pray the rosary every day is because Our Lady knows
that not everyone has the ability or this possibility to go to Mass every day.
But everybody, no matter what state in life, whether you're the king of France
or some little humble garbage collector, everybody has time to pray the rosary.
Because that way we can therefore have our hearts every day make contact with God.
And of course, it's not because we're going to have these nice feelings.
It's because we're going to have them mystically enter into the life of Christ and His Holy Mother.
And we know that these mysteries of our Lord's life transcend time.
So that, you know,
so many people, some science fiction people, they're always talking about, oh, time travel.
Wish we could go back or go into the future.
Well, with the rosary, we are able to kind of transcend time and enter into these mysteries.
We can be there at the Annunciation.
We can be there at the Crucifixion.
We can be there at the Resurrection when we enter into them in a mystical way through a life of prayer.
This is where, you know,
we can start to think about the resurrection.
We can start to think about the resurrection.
We can start doing what Pope John Paul II also said, that, you know,
so many people are captivated by the screen.
You know, they want the television or Internet.
They all want to look at something.
And they're being entertained and they're having all kinds of visions before their eyes,
but they don't have the right kind of vision.
We have to have the Gospel vision.
And the only way that we can do that is if we enter into it.
If we put our imaginations to something,
maybe much more productive and much more fruitful by entering into the ponderings of our Lady's heart and the life of Christ.
So today, as we meditate on this great feast that we celebrate, our Lady's Most Holy Rosary,
it also reminds us that the Rosary is one of the most powerful weapons that we have against evil.
For we celebrate this feast because of the great blessing,
the Battle of Lepanto in 1571,
when our Holy Father then, Pius V,
asked all of Christendom to pray
that we may overcome the enemies of the Church.
And the faithful at that time took our Holy Father's words seriously.
And we need to take our Holy Father,
the late and great Blessed John Paul II,
to heart again and take up the Rosary,
to pray it as individuals,
and as families,
and as parishes,
to help and to seek the grace that we can only find with our Lady.
Because the angel said to her,
you have found grace with God.
The only way we're going to find the grace for today
is if we go to our Lady,
the Mediatrix of all graces,
the woman who stood with Christ,
stood at the foot of the cross,
and has been given to us as our Mother.
And so, we pray,
and we should take her into our homes,
and pray her Most Holy Rosary
for the needs of our day,
to overcome the enemies of the family,
and the enemies of the Church,
who, instead of destroying our enemies,
we want their conversion,
and that we want them to become friends of God,
and His children as well.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Amen.