Category: Personal Relationships

My earliest memory of devotion to Mama Mary was praying the rosary before bed with my family on my plastic glow-in-the-dark beads. There were many evenings when I would feign sleep so that we would pray a shorter version of it or I could skip it altogether. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the mysteries nor could I understand why we mentioned them when the entire time we were “Hail-ing” Mama Mary. If there was one thing that didn’t change in our home, it was praying the rosary and when I left home, I left the rosary as well... until I was introduced to the Legion of Mary by my parents. In addition to the five decades, they had added the Catena Legionis prayed by every faithful legionary. It was at this point that my notion of Mama Mary as a docile, quiet and caring mother was turned on its head.

“You must know that when you ‘hail’ Mary, she immediately greets you! Don’t think that she is one of those rude women of whom there are so many. On the contrary, she is utterly courteous and pleasant. If you greet her, she will answer you right away and converse with you!”
~ St. Bernadine of Sienna

What do you think she would converse about? Just like a mother who is never tired speaking about her child, his likes and dislikes, his achievements and all those little details that only she knows about, Mary is eager to reveal her dear son Jesus to us.

The Holy Rosary is an enormous source of grace and spiritual protection and is one of the most powerful prayers of the Catholic Church. Sister Lucia dos Santos, one of the children to whom our Lady appeared at Fatima, once said,

“There is no problem, no matter how difficult it is, whether temporal or above all spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us, of our families ... that cannot be solved by the rosary. There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary."

After the holy sacrifice of the mass, the holy rosary is the prayer most pleasing to our Lady.

History is a testament to the fact that our Lady in general and the rosary, in particular, has had profound and unparalleled power. When the Albigensian heresy was stealing many away from the faith, Our Lady helped St. Dominic to battle the heresy through the rosary. As a result, many were rescued from falling away into error and brought back to the fold. The rosary not only has power in spiritual battles but has also shaped history and the world in which we live. In our own time, on 13th May 1981, Pope John Paul II was protected from certain death at the hands of Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, when a bullet fired went straight into his abdomen but miraculously missed his vital organs. He attributed this to our Lady of Fatima and later made a pilgrimage to that town in Portugal placing the bullet in the crown of the statue of our Lady. The feast of Our Lady of Victory was instituted some 4 centuries earlier after the great naval battle in history, the Battle of Lepanto.