(This article was published in the April 2025 Seasoned Servant Connection.)
In the first article of this series, we noted two common difficulties people experience when praying the Rosary. The first is the seemingly impossible challenge of reflecting on a decade’s mystery while also trying to focus on the words of the decade’s Hail Mary’s, which typically don’t connect directly to the individual mysteries. The second is the mind’s insatiable appetite for distractions. These problems are so prevalent that even St. Therese of Lisieux, a Doctor of the Church, wrote of them and considered praying the Rosary to be more difficult than wearing an article of penance!
Having experienced these problems for years, and hearing from others that their experiences of the Rosary were essentially the same as mine, it came as quite a surprise when I learned what the future Saint John Paul II had said of the Rosary in his Angelus address two weeks after being elected to the See of Peter: “The Rosary is my favorite prayer. A marvelous prayer! Marvelous in its simplicity and in its depth” (Angelus, 10-29-78). Based on my experience, I didn’t see how any person could make such a statement, unless there were a “missing element” in the method of praying the Rosary, a missing element that, generally speaking, wasn’t being taught. As much as I respected this great Pope, I was firmly in the camp of St. Therese on this one.
My suspicion regarding the missing element seemed to be confirmed in the writings of St. Francis de Sales, Doctor of the Church, who wrote: “The Rosary is a very useful form of prayer, provided you know how to say it properly.” Now, how could there be a problem with praying the Rosary properly if it’s just a matter of reciting its three basic prayers? How could one not know how to “say it properly”? Unfortunately, St. Francis didn’t explain what he meant about that little detail. Nevertheless, it seemed clear that there was a missing element, and I was in the hunt for it. Knowing of John Paul II’s great devotion to the Virgin Mary, I rightly thought the missing element might be found in his letter on the Rosary, published in 2002, though my first reading of the letter didn’t pick up on it. Nevertheless, I was on the brink of finding that “missing element.” That will be the subject of the next article in this series.
Theology and Sanity 