May 6, 2019

As the Marian Year celebrations continue, we find it pertinent to reflect on the Message of Our Lady, which she gave to the whole world during her apparitions at Fatima in Portugal to the three shepherd children: Lucy dos Santos age 9, and her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto ages 8 and 6, respectively. It was the same message she repeated during her apparitions that took place monthly for six consecutive months, beginning from May 13 to October 13, 1917. The message can be summarized in two points, namely Prayer and Penance.  This month, our focus is on prayer. Before we go into explaining the meaning of prayer, let us first understand what Fatima entails spiritually, and also enumerate the other requests of Our Lady, among which the issue of prayer, especially the recitation of the Holy Rosary, is found.

 

In a nutshell, “Fatima is Heaven’s intervention to save us from persecution, war, annihilation, enslavement and Hell.  Fatima is a visit by Our Heavenly Mother Mary in our time for our time.  It is a message of concern, a practical place for world peace, a promise of Heaven” (Fatima Herald, A Publication of the World Apostolate of Fatima, Nigeria, vol. 9, August 2014, p.4). Our Lady came with a message from God to every person of our century, promising that the whole world would be in peace, and that many souls would go to Heaven if her requests were obeyed.  According to her, “…war is a punishment for sin…God would punish the world for its sins in our time by means of war, hunger, persecution of the Church and persecution of the Holy Father, the Pope, unless we listened to and obeyed the commands of God” (Fatima Herald, p. 4). On May 13, 1991, Pope John Paul II, at Fatima, said, “The message of Fatima is more relevant and more urgent than when Our Lady first appeared.  The message is an anguished appeal of Our Heavenly Mother, who sees us in great danger and who comes to offer Her help: Her message is also a prophecy, a clear indication of what was about to transpire in the 20^th Century, and what is still going to happen infallibly in the near future, depending on our response to Her requests” (Fatima Herald, p. 4).

 

Her requests are five.  They are (1) Reparation on the First Saturday of five consecutive months; (2) Monthly confession; (3) Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays (4) Recitation of the Rosary; and (5) The Fifteen Minute Meditation on the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary. Out of these requests, this write-up treats the fourth one—the recitation of the Holy Rosary. Before we go into that, we must understand what prayer is all about.

 

What is prayer? Prayer has been variously defined as conversation with God; communing with God; talking with God; listening to God and practising the presence of God, etc. From whatever angle it is viewed, prayer is a dialogue between a Supreme Being (God) and human beings.  Sometimes we talk with God, at other times, we allow God to talk to us.  In his book entitled A Call to Priestly Holiness, Fr. Michael Mozia describes prayer as “an attitude, a habitual inclination of the mind before God. It is an attitude of interior freedom for God—availability for God alone” (A Call to Priestly Holiness, Ibadan: C. I. Shaneson, 1987, p. 66).      He further explains that prayer must be a dialogue between God and man; he says precisely that it is a dialogue of life and dialogue of love; in our daily programme of life, God must be included.

 

Prayer is an inter-personal relationship in which there is a verbal or non-verbal communication between God and the individual.  This communication is not just an exchange of words, but it is more of mutual self-revelation between God and the praying person. In this sense, “prayer life” means that our life has been possessed by God. “It is living in God and God in you” (Jn. 15:5).  According to St. Theresa of Avila, “Prayer is the doorway to great graces; if this door is closed, I do not see how God can bestow any graces” (Saint Companions For Each Day, Bangalore, St. Paul’s, 1995,p. 341).  Why do we pray? St. Alphonsus de Liguori says that the man who prays is saved and the man who does not pray is lost.  Consequently, we pray so that we may be delivered from eternal damnation.  Within the context of this Fatima Message, we pray in order to avert God’s just anger.  Considering our sins, we deserve to die, and to die eternally. However, we pray so that God may have mercy on us and not to treat us according to our sinfulness.  It was Mahatma Gandhi who once remarked that “Prayer has saved my life; without it, I should have become a lunatic long ago”. In a nutshell, we pray so that we may be saved.

 

In each of the six apparitions of 1917, Our Lady requested people to pray the Rosary every day.  Since it is a question of repairing offences committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary, there is no other vocal prayer that could be more pleasing to her. In fact, the Blessed Virgin Mary once said, “The prayer of my predilection is the Holy Rosary. For this reason, in my apparitions, I always ask that it be recited”(Lecture prepared by Very Rev. Fr. Ohieku on Our Lady of Fatima, 2004, p. 4).  In the last apparition of Our Lady at Fatima on October 13, 1917, she appeared as the Queen of the Holy Rosary.  In one hand, she held the Rosary and in the other the Scapular.  She had once told St. Dominic Guzman that the Rosary and the Scapular would one day save the world. Indeed, these two weapons are already saving the contemporary world from going into extinction.

 

Why is the Holy Rosary so effective?  One reason is that the Rosary is a thinking prayer. Bad thinking brought us into the ugly situation we find ourselves today. Thus, the recitation of the Holy Rosary, which necessarily includes meditation on the mysteries of Jesus and Mary, shall certainly purify our thoughts. That is why Our Lady pleaded and insisted that Christians must pray the Rosary daily. Reparation holds back the hand of God from striking the world for the just punishments it deserves for its numerous crimes.  The Rosary is like a sword or weapon Our Lady can use to cut down heresy and the forces of evil.  It is most powerful and several times, it has saved the world from situations as bad as, or perhaps worse than, the one confronting us today.

 

Mark Miravalle defines the Rosary as “…a beautiful combination of vocal prayer and meditation that centers upon the greatest gospel mysteries in the life of Jesus Christ and secondarily in the life of the Mother of Jesus.  It is an ‘Incarnational’ prayer, a prayer consisting of both vocal and mental prayers that serve to incorporate both body and soul into spiritual communion with our Lord” (Introduction to Mary: The Heart of Marian Doctrine and Devotion, 1993, p. 86).

 

Pope Paul VI simply sees the Rosary as a “Compendium of the entire Gospel” (see Marialis Cultus, no. 42). This is because the Rosary draws from the Gospel the presentation of the mysteries and its main formulas.  Hence, contemporary pastors and scholars would like to define it as a “Gospel Prayer”.  A Dominican theologian named R. Garrigou-Lagrange holds that the Rosary is, “A credo, not an abstract one, but one concretized in the life of Jesus who came down to us from the Father and who ascended to bring us back with Himself to the Father.  It is the whole of Christian dogma in all its splendour and elevation, brought to us that we may fill our souls with it” (Introduction to Mary…, p. 88).

 

Innumerable miracles have been performed through the recitation of the Holy Rosary.  In the first place, the Blessed Virgin Mary gave the Rosary to St. Dominic Guzman and directed him to combine its recitation with his powerful preaching—that the combination of the Rosary and Preaching would help him to defeat the Albigensian heresy. And so it was. This heresy denied the infinite goodness and power of God, and held that all created things were evil. Albigensianism attacked Christian morality and Christian doctrine. It opposed truths like Creation, the Incarnation, true Redemption and Eternal Life.  Thus, as a spiritual instrument to fight the moral and dogmatic errors of Albigensianism, and also as an instrument against future errors and difficulties, St. Dominic reported that he received, under the inspiration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a unique combination of preaching and prayer which would later constitute the basis of the prayer-form called the Rosary. Garrigou-Lagrange says:

 

…under her inspiration, St. Dominic went into the village of the heretics, gathered the people, and preached to them the mysteries of salvation—The Incarnation, the Redemption and Eternal Life. As Mary had taught him to do, he distinguished the different kinds of mysteries, and after each short instruction he had ten Hail Marys recited….And what the word of the preacher was unable to do, the sweet prayer of the Hail Mary did for hearts.  As Mary promised, it proved to be a most fruitful form of preaching (Introduction to Mary…, p. 89).

 

Another officially recorded miracle performed by the recitation of the Rosary was the Battle at Lepanto.  This battle was fought in 1571 between the Christians and the Turks.  At that time, the Turks were overrunning all Europe and appeared to be on the verge of wiping out Christianity.  When all seems to be lost, Pope Pius V organized a great Rosary Crusade against the Turks. St. Pius was a Dominican and Dominicans have a great devotion to the Holy Rosary. The Christian soldiers literally went into battle with swords on one hand and Rosaries in the other.

 

On October 7, 1571, one of the greatest miracles took place. The Christian forces under Don John and Andrea Dorian met the Turks off the Coast of Greece, the Gulf of Lepanto, and miraculously defeated them.  The smaller Christian fleet, greatly outnumbered, defeated the mighty Turkish Armada, and Christendom was saved—all through the power of the Rosary.  In fact, Don John confessed that the victory was won, not by fighting arms, but by praying arms. In thanksgiving for this victory, the Feast of the Most Holy Rosary was established on October 7.

 

Permit me to conclude this piece by encouraging all Catholics to recite the Rosary daily in their various families, especially in this Marian Year. This is because besides being the Greatest Marian Prayer, the Rosary is the best family prayer.  It is through the recitation of the Rosary that the Catholic family truly proves itself to be the domestic sanctuary of the Church (see Paul VI, Marialis Cultus, no. 52). If the recitation of the Rosary could help to surmount difficulties faced by whole countries—the Battle at Lepanto and Albigensianism in France—your family problems, which are obviously fewer, will be surmounted, provided you recite the Rosary with all the seriousness, sincerity and devotion its deserves.

BY REV. FR. MARK AJIGA