Prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary

The word Rosary means “Crown of Roses”. Our Lady has revealed to several people that each time they say a Hail Mary they are giving her a beautiful rose and that each complete Rosary makes her a crown of roses. The rose is the queen of flowers, and so the Rosary is the rose of all devotions and it is therefore the most important one. The Holy Rosary is considered a perfect prayer because within it lies the awesome story of our salvation. With the Rosary in fact we meditate the mysteries of joy, of sorrow, of glory and of light Jesus and Mary. It’s a simple prayer, humble so much like Mary. It’s a prayer we can all say together with Her, the Mother of God. With the Hail Mary we invite Her to pray for us. Our Lady always grants our request. She joins Her prayer to ours. Therefore it becomes ever more useful, because what Mary asks She always receives, Jesus can never say no to whatever His Mother asks for. In every apparition, the heavenly Mother has invited us to say the Rosary as a powerful weapon against evil, to bring us to true peace. With your prayer made together with Your heavenly Mother, you can obtain the great gift of bringing about a change of hearts and conversion. Each day, through prayer you can drive away from yourselves and from your homeland many dangers and many evils.

It can seem a repetitive prayer but instead it is like two sweethearts who many times say one another the words: “I love you”…

The Blessed Holy Father John Paul II on October 16th, 2002 with the Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae on the Most Holy Rosary has added 5 new mysteries of the Rosary: The Mysteries of the Light, The Luminous.

The whole Rosary is composed of twenty decades. Each decade is recited in honor of a mystery in Our Lord’s Life and that of His Blessed Mother.  It is customary to recite five decades at a time while meditating on one set of mysteries. The decades may be separated, if the entire chaplet is completed on the same day. Each Mystery meditate “bead by bead” for every Hail Mary of the decade.

The Mysteries of the Rosary can be prayed following a schedule:

JOYFUL on Monday and Saturday

LUMINOUS on Thursday

SORROWFUL on Tuesday and Friday

GLORIOUS on Wednesday and Sunday

Mary’s Great Promise at Fatima

The Five First Saturdays are intended to honor and to make reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for all the blasphemes and ingratitude of men.

This devotion and the wonderful promises connected with it were revealed by the Blessed Virgin at Fatima, a small village in Portugal. Our lady appeared to three children there in 1917, and one of the little girls, Lucy, tells us that Our Lady said:

I promise to help at the hour of death, with the graces needed for salvation, whoever on the First Saturday of five consecutive months shall:

1. Confess and Receive Communion.

2. Recite five decades of the Rosary (Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful, or Glorious Mysteries)

3. Keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation to me.

Our names, especially nicknames, express something of who we are and what we can do. The Litany of Loreto seems like a compendium of names of Mary. We can contemplate the work of God in Mary under each of these names which express different facets of her fullness of grace, and we can also beg for graces which correspond to these names. As a student and preacher-to-be, I like to pray to Mary Seat of Wisdom, and I think of how Mary lives her life completely in light of God as the highest cause of all things, which is true “wisdom.” We might be led to awe in what it means for her to be Mother of God when we contemplate how God has also placed her as Queen of Angels. Or again, when we pray to her as Mother of divine grace, I think of how her willing and worthy motherhood of God overflows spiritually to all of us, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that she “mothers each new grace/ that now does reach our race.” In this sense, this “compendium” is a catechism.

This prayer is named from the first word of the prayer, “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.” It is a simple and brief set of prayers, easy to memorize, typically prayed at the beginning, middle and end of the day. It lays the mystery of the Annunciation before our eyes in the midst of the worries and occupations of our life. What graces can we seek here? The mystery is multi-faceted. Mary receives the Incarnate Son in her womb by her fiat. Looking upwards from the Incarnation, we contemplate the mystery of the Trinity, the Father who sends the Son, and the Virgin overshadowed by the Spirit. Looking sideways from the mystery of the Incarnation, we see the passion, death and resurrection for which Jesus was made man. It is also the mystery of God’s prevenient grace to us, which is both unmerited and unbidden. On the moral level, we can contemplate our own need to be attentive and obedient to the voice of God in the unexpected times and ways He speaks—which we live out when we punctuate our days with the Angelus.

The scapular devotion, in its postage-stamp-sized variety, is a sort of symbolic sharing in the mission and prayers of a religious order. The most famous version is probably the Brown Scapular, which was given to the Carmelite friar St. Simon Stock. It has a rather hefty promise with it: preservation from the fires of hell. As the Church teaches, sacramentals exist to dispose us to receive the effects of the sacraments (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1667). This sacramental, then, does not entail making an end run on the need for the sacraments, especially the sacrament of penance. Mary promises us her intercession to be inserted in—and remain inserted in—this divinely revealed order, if we are faithful in devotion to her. The physical aspect of the scapular—it is worn—makes it a tangible reminder of Mary’s power to intercede for us.

This prayer is named from the first word of the prayer, “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.” It is a simple and brief set of prayers, easy to memorize, typically prayed at the beginning, middle and end of the day. (I know some people who have set a “bell” to ring on their cellphones at the proper times for the Angelus.) It lays the mystery of the Annunciation before our eyes in the midst of the worries and occupations of our life. What graces can we seek here? The mystery is multi-faceted. Mary receives the Incarnate Son in her womb by her fiat. Looking upwards from the Incarnation, we contemplate the mystery of the Trinity, the Father who sends the Son, and the Virgin overshadowed by the Spirit. Looking sideways from the mystery of the Incarnation, we see the passion, death and resurrection for which Jesus was made man. It is also the mystery of God’s prevenient grace to us, which is both unmerited and unbidden. On the moral level, we can contemplate our own need to be attentive and obedient to the voice of God in the unexpected times and ways He speaks—which we live out when we punctuate our days with the Angelus.

In his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) Pope Francis states that when we find something that is good or beautiful or compelling—whether it is a movie, a work of art, a book, or a person—we don’t keep it to ourselves. Rather, we should be filled with a missionary fervor to share it. This is one of ways we can cultivate joy, bathing people as it were in those things that are suggestive of God, because whatever is good, whatever is beautiful, whatever is true, reflects God. This principle applies first and foremost to our experience of Jesus Christ risen from the dead. We want, with a reckless abandon, to give this supremely good news away. This energy, this compulsion— “woe to me if I do not evangelize”—is, for Pope Francis, the beating heart of the church.

Such is case also with the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. In 1866, this beautiful icon was given to the Redemptorists by Pope Pius IX as of way of helping them in their mission of evangelizing the poor and most abandoned. Aware that this growing Congregation was about to begin a period of growth that would carry them throughout the world, the Pope commissioned them to make the icon known and proclaim, as had their founder, the glories of Mary, telling them: “Make her known throughout the world.”  Filled with a missionary fervor to share it, the Redemptorists made the icon a missionary, a painted gospel, proclaiming through its color, symbols and figures, the abundance of God’s Redemption.