How To Understand St. Dominic's Rosary
Today is the Feast of St Dominic
St. Dominic was is unique in the way he used the Rosary as a powerful tool of evangelization. The great Dominican theologian, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange writes: At the end of the 12th century southern France was ravaged by the Albigensian heresy – a heresy which denied the infinite goodness and power of God by admitting a principle of evil which was often victorious…It was at that moment that Our Blessed Lady made known to St. Dominic a kind of preaching till then unknown, which she said would be one of the most powerful weapons against future errors and in future difficulties. Under her inspiration, St Dominic went into the villages of the Albigensians, gathered the people, and preached to them the mysteries of salvation — the Incarnation, the redemption, 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 Mary’s 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., p. 255
We pray the Rosary in a new way
· that is an old way
· introduced by St. Dominic
o a short teaching from the Word of God,
o and then we pray one decade of the Rosary
and we do this five times.
St Dominic went out to people
He was a missionary of friendship – and he encouraged them to pray the Rosary. We must do the same today because so many people are in the deepest spiritual funk. They tell me they’ve fallen away from God. They have more time now than ever, but they are wasting it. They are not going to Sunday Mass; not praying; and they are eating and drinking too much. As a result, they are overwhelmed by the emotions of fear, anger and frustration about the world.
We are getting our butts kicked by the devil and we have rolled over. When Dominic saw this, he got busy and failed. Then the Mother of God came to him with a simple method: Gather people, give them some short teaching to think about, pray the Rosary with them. It worked for Dominic – it will work for us.
Share this podcast with someone. Just send it to them and say: “I liked this and thought you might as well.” Then follow up and see if they listened and what they thought.
Even more, invite family and friends to join you at home. Offer hospitality, a meal, drinks, coffee, dessert, and engage in good conversation by just being interested in their life and their interests; then invite them into your normal routine to pray the Rosary. Afterward, ask them what caught their attention during the meditations. Now you have something good to talk about. And get good at asking follow-up questions – Why caught your attention in the meditation? Why? What conclusions does it lead you to?
Listen and pray this audio Rosary with others, or you can print the meditation, read it aloud and pray the decades in between each teaching. Do whatever you like. But do something…
The Power of the Rosary
When the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both bombing sites experienced miracles associated with the rosary. When Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945, an entire house of Jesuits survived, completely unaffected by the bomb. The Jesuit house was located only eight blocks from where the atomic bomb went off and should have been completely annihilated. A church attached to the Jesuit house and everything else around it for miles was obliterated, but the house with the Jesuits in it survived largely intact. Furthermore, none of the Jesuits suffered any ill effects from radiation or loss of hearing whatsoever. In fact, all eight Jesuits lived healthy lives for years after the event. One of the survivors, Fr. Hubert Schiffer, SJ, gave public testimony more than 200 times about what had miraculously happened to him and his confreres. He testified that he firmly believed that they were spared because they prayed the rosary every day in that house in response to the request of Our Lady at Fatima.
Austria was divided by the four Allies
Most do not know that after World War II, Austria was divided by the four Allies. The most Catholic section of Austria, which included Vienna, was given to Communist Russia. The Austrian people desperately desired to find a way to escape their Marxist oppression. The answer came through the rosary. In 1946, Fr. Petrus Pavlicek was reminded of what the rosary had done for the Christian world during the Battle of Lepanto and heard an interior voice instructing, “Do as I say and there will be peace.”
Fr. Pevlicek organized a Holy Rosary Crusade of Reparation in 1947, consisting of the Viennese people conducting a public rosary procession in the streets of their city. The explicit intention for the rosary crusade was to bring about an end to Marxism in their country and the entire world. Initially, the processions were small, but over time, the numbers grew to enormous proportions. By 1955, the public praying of the rosary drew more than a half million people. Then, to everyone’s surprise, on May 13, 1955, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, the Soviets announced that they were leaving Austria of their own accord. Everyone attributed this miraculous turn of events to the rosary. In 1962, the German mystic and Servant of God Theresa Neumann (1898–1962) was asked why Russia had left Austria. She said it had taken place because of the rosaries prayed by the Austrian people.
Blessed Jane of Aza
When St. Dominic's mother, Blessed Jane of Aza, was pregnant, she had a dream of a dog with a torch in its mouth, running around the world and setting everything on fire. She went to the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos and asked a monk what it meant. He replied that the child in her womb would be a great preacher, who would set the world ablaze with the fire of his words.” In fact, the word ‘Dominican’ is a play on the Latin, Domini canes, which means ‘dogs of the Lord.”
Lets be dogs of the Lord running about setting the world on fire with the Rosary
We can’t let what we are living now be the new normal. Isolation is evil. Come live life together; were gonna have some fun!