A Rosary Odyssey – 4: A Few Concerns

(This article was published in the September 2025 Seasoned Servant Connection.)

The previous article of this series noted three signs implying that the method it described for praying the Rosary is a good approach to the prayer. Those signs are the following: a significant decrease in distractions, a heightened awareness of the details of each mystery as it was being prayed, and the rapid passing of time while praying the Rosary. Nevertheless, the article’s closing lines mentioned the existence of concerns about the method and a promise to address them in the next article. There were three: First, the technique was novel, as far as I knew; second, being an apparent expansion of St. Louis de Montfort’s approach there did not appear to be a spiritual authority on which one could say the technique was based; third, there remained the apparent contradiction of attempting to devoutly recite the words of the Hail Mary’s while simultaneously applying the mind to a set of a mysteries that, apart from the Annunciation and Visitation, aren’t directly related to the words of the prayer.

Before we begin to address these concerns, let us consider a question about the principal element of this method, that of recalling a Scripture verse in the middle of each of the decades’ Hail Mary’s immediately following the name of Jesus. One might think that the natural place for adding this verse is between the Hail Mary’s rather than in the middle of each Hail Mary. St. John Paul II addresses this in his Apostolic Letter, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, by calling the name of Jesus the “center of gravity in the Hail Mary, the hinge as it were which joins its two parts.”

A year after putting this technique into practice, I returned to John Paul’s apostolic letter while preparing to teach a class on the subject. This time around, I saw his suggestion in a somewhat different light, perhaps due to my experience with the technique itself. It now became clear that what he was recommending differed from de Montfort only in the implementation of de Montfort’s concept; de Montfort recommended the addition of “a word or two to each Hail Mary” whereas John Paul II recommended “the addition of a clause referring to the mystery” being meditated upon. In both cases, the intent is to add a single idea that refers to Jesus in the mystery at hand. Since a clause can take the form of a sentence, there can be no objection to implementing the Pope’s suggestion by using a short Scripture verse that refers to the mystery. This addressed the first two concerns noted above: the method that had somehow come to me was not novel, and it was consistent with the teaching of de Montfort as well as that of John Paul II. But what about that third concern? It has an interesting twist that we will address in the next article, and after that I will begin sharing the Scripture verses that I have assembled for the mysteries of the Rosary.

Part 5: The Odyssey’s End