(Author’s note:) This is the first article of the Annotated Rosary series of articles to be published in the Seasoned Servant Connection newsletter. It was published in March 2025.
If you regularly come to the end of a decade of the Rosary only to find yourself wondering which mystery is associated with the decade you have been praying, you have plenty of company. It’s not an uncommon problem; in fact, it’s at the heart of one of the “mysteries” of the Rosary. That is, can a prayer that seems to be carried out so absent-mindedly actually be an authentic act of prayer?
It appears that St. Therese of Lisieux is speaking of this problem when she writes in Story of a Soul: “When alone (I am ashamed to admit it) the recitation of the rosary is more difficult for me than the wearing of an instrument of penance. I feel I have said this so poorly! I force myself in vain to meditate on the mysteries of the rosary; I don’t succeed in fixing my mind on them. For a long time I was desolate about this lack of devotion which astonished me, for I love the Blessed Virgin so much that it should be easy for me to recite in her honor prayers which are so pleasing to her.”
My own experience with the Rosary, some decades in the past, was consistent with the quote from St. Therese. From my perspective, there were two problems with the Rosary. First, there was the problem of trying to recite the repetitious Hail Mary’s with an intent that was consistent with the words of the prayer, while at the same time trying to meditate on the associated mystery when the words of the prayer do not address the mystery at hand. For example, the first sorrowful mystery, the Agony of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemani, has no literal connection to the Hail Mary except for one word, the name of Jesus. The same is true for all the other mysteries of the Rosary except for the Annunciation and the Visitation, which we meet in the Joyful Mysteries. Consequently, the two actions seemed to be mutually exclusive, for both the mindful recitation of the words of the Hail Mary and the meditation on a mystery so tenuously connected to the words of the prayer require the focused use of our minds when, in fact, our minds are not capable of focusing on two different things at the same time.
The second problem was the wandering of the mind while praying the Rosary. In The Sadness of Christ, St. Thomas More characterizes this problem at length. Among his various observations of the problem, he writes that if immediately after finishing our prayers we could recall all the thoughts that had come to mind during that time of prayer, “we would be amazed that it was at all possible for our minds to dissipate themselves in such a short time among so many places at such great distance from each other, among so many different affairs, such various, such manifold, such idle pursuits.”
This was precisely my experience with the Rosary. It was not unusual to get to the end of a decade and, at that point, being unable to remember what mystery I was on. It was necessary to look at the beads to count off the decades to know what to announce for the next mystery. Furthermore, the time spent praying the Rosary seemed to drag on forever. How could I possibly benefit, I reasoned, from what appeared to be little more than a repetition of prayers in an essentially, though unintentionally, mindless fashion. For me, there was nothing particularly attractive about praying the Rosary; it was more like an act of penance than an act of prayer. There seemed to be a key element missing from what I knew about praying the Rosary. In the next article of this series, the search for that missing element begins.
Theology and Sanity 