Why pray the Rosary every day for a year?
Each time the Blessed Virgin has appeared-- whether it be to Saint Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes; to Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco at Fatima; or to Mariette Beco at Banneux-- she has asserted the importance, saving grace, and power of praying the Holy Rosary on a daily basis. Based upon her words, the Rosary is penance and conversion for sinners, a pathway to peace, an end to war, and a powerful act of faith in Jesus Christ. Pope Paul VI presented the Rosary as a powerful means to reach Christ "not merely with Mary but indeed, insofar as this is possible to us, in the same way as Mary, who is certainly the one who thought about Him more than anyone else has ever done."
To show us how this is done, perhaps no one has been more eloquent than the great Cardinal Newman, who wrote: "The great power of the Rosary consists in the fact that it translates the Creed into Prayer. Of course, the Creed is already in a certain sense a prayer and a great act of homage towards God, but the Rosary brings us to meditate again on the great truth of His life and death, and brings this truth close to our hearts. Even Christians, although they know God, usually fear rather than love Him. The strength of the Rosary lies in the particular manner in which it considers these mysteries, since all our thinking about Christ is intertwined with the thought of His Mother, in the relations between Mother and Son; the Holy Family is presented to us, the home in which God lived His infinite love."
As Mary said at Fatima, "Jesus wants to use you to make Me known and loved. He wishes to establish the devotion to My Immaculate Heart throughout the world. I promise salvation to whoever embraces it; these souls will be dear to God, like flowers put by Me to adorn his throne."
Today, August 19, we celebrate the feast day of
Saint Jean Eudes (1601-1680), priest, founder of the congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge, and devotee of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Saint Jean was devoted to both the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and popularized this devotion through several books. Below, and excerpt from one of these texts,
The Admirable Heart of Mary (chapter 6).
"Mary Kept All These Words, Pondering Them in Her Heart"
Devotion to the admirable Heart of Mary is by no means new, for it springs from the adorable Heart of the most Holy Trinity, and it is as old as the Christian religion and the Gospel itself. St. Luke the Evangelist bears witness to this in one chapter of his gospel by making twice a particular mention of her most holy Heart. In the 19th verse of chapter 2 he says: "But Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart," and in the 51st verse: "And his mother kept all these words in her heart."
The devotion, therefore, has its origin and foundation in the holy Gospel itself. The Holy Spirit inspired the evangelists and willed that one of them should speak with such particular honor of the virginal Heart of the Savior’s Mother, representing it as the sacred depository and faithful custodian of the ineffable mysteries and inestimable treasures contained in the life of Our Lord. This must have been written that we might likewise honor her august Heart, so worthy to be honored forever.
Mary kept all these things in her Heart, that is, all the marvelous events of our Savior’s life. "This holy Virgin," writes St. Ambrose, "always carried in the depths of her heart the mysteries of God and the Passion of her Son and whatever else He did" (1).
She kept these things as wonderful tokens of the love of her dear Son for His heavenly Father and for mankind. She kept them as sacred relics preserved and cherished for most special veneration. She kept all these things as a store of precious fuel to augment divine fire brought upon earth by her divine Son and to inflame the hearts of men with fresh love. She kept them because they were the foundation stones on which our adorable Savior willed to build His Church.
Mary kept these things in her Heart as living miracles and incomprehensible works of the all-powerful goodness of God, with which evangelical history was to be filled. She kept them as precious mysteries and secrets consoling and divine, representing the new alliance of God with men under the covenant of the New Testament. She kept them also as the precious inheritance and rich share of God’s chosen children, joint heirs with the Son of God.
Our Lady kept all these words in her Heart as the source and foundation of the divine graces to be spread throughout the world, and of the immortal glories which were to shine forever in heaven. She guarded them as the boundless treasure of Divine Mercy with which she could enrich all the denizens of heaven and earth. She kept them to be the bread and wine placed on the table of the Heavenly Father to His children, as a priceless manna brought down from heaven by her beloved Son that mortal men might feast on the bread of angels.
Mary, the General of the great King’s army, kept these words as celestial weapons for her to place in the hands of her soldiers and thus help them to overcome the enemies of God and of their own salvation. She kept them also as sacred torches to lighten the path of mankind shrouded in the gloom and shadows of death.
She kept them as medicine to heal our souls from all types of evil and as a powerful remedy to fill mankind with all kinds of good. She kept them as inexhaustible records of Divine Wisdom, in which we might find the divine lore of the saints. She kept them as the very Heart of Jesus, her Son, and therefore, as her own Heart. The heart of man is the source of his life, and the treasury of his secrets, plans and aspirations, so likewise Sacred Scripture, containing as it does the word of God, is the source of the life Our Savior wills to have in His members, and the treasury of His designs and secrets. St. Augustine (2) and St. Gregory (3) both refer to Holy Writ as the Heart of God.
She kept them, not in part, but entirely, omnia. In the first place, Our Lady knew that no part of the Savior’s life could be termed small, that everything in Him was great, divine and admirable and that each one of His footsteps, each breath, each flutter of his eyelids, each very least thought of His, deserved the eternal adoration of angels and men. In the second place, Mary knew that the love of her Son Jesus Christ for mankind is so great that He counts every hair of their heads: "The very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Lk 12:7); all their thoughts, all their steps: "Thou indeed hast numbered my steps" (Job 14:16); and that He takes into account the least action performed for love of Him, in order to reward each deed with an eternal glory. He keeps them in His Heart as a precious treasure and guards them as the apple of His eye, according to the divine words: "The alms of a man is as signet with him, and shall preserve the grace of a man as the apple of the eye" (Sir 17:18), which means, "As a man having a purse full of diamonds would guard each stone jealously, so does God keep the alms given or the favor shown to a poor man, even if it were only a glass of water."
But why did the glorious Virgin keep all these things so worthily and so holily in her Heart? Why? Because of her ardent love for her Divine Son and for us. She kept these mysteries in her Heart to adore and glorify them incessantly in the name of all men for whom they were fulfilled, men who nevertheless remained indifferent. She kept them that they might one day be adored and glorified throughout the world, and become like so many inexhaustible fountains of grace and blessings for all the souls belonging to the household of God.
She kept all these words so that she might reveal them to the evangelists to be written in the holy Gospel and thus they would become the center of the faith and religion of all Christians. She kept these words, finally, to repeat them to the holy Apostles, who were to make the treasures of Mary’s Heart known and reverenced throughout the entire world.
Let us now see what is meant by the words: Conferens in corde suo. Mary kept all these things, comparing them one with the other. St. John Chrysostom and several other Fathers say that the Blessed Virgin Mary, having read what the Prophets had foretold concerning the Savior, compared their prophecies with the events that were happening before her own eyes, admiring and honoring the marvelous conformity of the latter with the former. St. Bernard is of the opinion that the comparison concerned the admirable parallel of prediction and fulfillment of the angelical salutation, the conception of the Son of God in her chaste womb, her painless child-birth, the adoration of shepherds and kings, the flight into Egypt, and all the other mysteries of the Redeemer which occurred in His Blessed Mother’s presence. Thus did Mary keep in her Heart and compare everything she saw in her beloved Son and whatever she learned from His divine lips in their familiar intercourse. It was revealed to St. Brigid that while the adorable Infant Jesus lived with His holy Mother, He manifested many divine secrets, not merely to enlighten and guide her, but also to enable Mary to teach and enlighten others. Hence the martyr St. Ignatius, in a letter addressed to Our Lady calls her Apostolorum doctricem, "Teacher of the Apostles" (4). Other writers call her Heart the "library of the Apostles," the treasury of wisdom "where they learned," says St. Jerome, "many things they would never have known otherwise" (5).
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