Angelus News | October 25, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 36

NEW WORLD
OF FAITH
BY ARCHBISHOP JOSÉ H. GOMEZ
The rosary is a prayer of the heart
We are concluding this month that
the Church dedicates to the holy rosary,
and I want to encourage all of us to
go deeper in our practice of this holy
devotion.
We all need to pray more urgently,
with greater intensity. It is the only
path to take if we want to grow in our
relationship with God. For me, praying
the rosary every day has become a part
of my own life and it is a powerful help
in my own efforts to follow Jesus.
We live in a noisy, crowded world,
constantly confronted by sounds and
images, impressions, and sensations.
Our technologies and our way of life
make it hard for us to carve out time
and space just to be quiet and reflect,
to be alone with our thoughts and go
“inside ourselves.”
That is why we need the rosary. It is
a prayer of the heart, a way of contemplation.
In the rhythms and repetitions of the
rosary, we enter into a space of silence
in which we open our hearts in the
presence of God. We enter this silence
aware of our failings and sins, bringing
with us our concerns for the world, all
the burdens of our lives.
It is beautiful how the repetitions
of this prayer correspond with the
rhythms of our breathing and the beating
of our hearts.
Some people find the repetitions
of the rosary to be annoying or just
routine. But if we pray with true
piety, with true love in our hearts for
Jesus and Mary, then these patterns
of repeated words, all of them words
from the sacred Scriptures, will lead us
into the presence of God and into the
contemplation of his mysteries.
At the center of the Hail Mary that we
repeat is the name of Jesus, the name
in which we have salvation — “Blessed
is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
It is a good habit to pray the rosary
with the Gospels. St. John Paul II
recommended that we announce each
mystery and read the related Gospel
passage, contemplating the face of
Christ in the mystery and then listening
for the “word” that he wants to
speak to us through this mystery.
The mysteries of his life are the great
truths of our faith — the joy of his incarnation,
as he is “born of the Virgin
“The rosary is the
prayer of the saints,
part of the secret of
their sanctity.”
Mary”; the light that he brings with his
life “for us men and for our salvation”;
the sorrow of his passion, as “he suffered
under Pontius Pilate”; the glory of
his resurrection “on the third day”; and
his promise that “he will come again.”
Our newest saint, St. John Henry
Newman, said, “The greater power
of the rosary lies in this, that it makes
the Creed into a prayer [and] gives us
the great truths of his life and death to
meditate upon, and brings them nearer
to our hearts.”
The rosary is the prayer of the saints,
it is part of the secret of their sanctity,
their closeness to Christ.
With Mary, we remember his presence
among us, we ponder his words, his
actions. Meditating on these mysteries,
we enter day by day into his life and
gradually his life comes to penetrate
our lives. And as Mary did, we open
our lives to live in response to his
saving word: “May it be done to me
according to your word.”
The reality of our Christian lives is
that Jesus wants to be born in each of
us. He wants his life to become our
life, and he wants our life to become
his life.
The rosary is a prayer that leads to this
transformation. When we pray with
devotion, when we order our lives to
God’s will, we allow him to shape us
and form us in the image of his Son.
Through this prayer, the mysteries of
his life continue to unfold in our lives,
as God works out his loving plan for
our salvation.
The key is to pray as children, letting
our mother lead us, learning to see her
Son through her eyes.
When we do this, when the rosary
becomes a habit with us, we find that
the spirit of this prayer carries over
into our daily life and our duties at
home, at work or at school, making us
contemplatives in the world.
Pray the rosary with confidence and
you will feel peace, and begin to have
more of a supernatural outlook on
the things going on in the world and
in your life, and you will sense God’s
presence more and his Providence.
Pray for me this week, and I will be
praying for you.
And let us ask the Blessed Virgin
Mary to intercede for us and to inspire
in each of us a new experience of the
beauty and the power of the rosary.
To read more columns by Archbishop José H. Gomez or to subscribe, visit www.angelusnews.com.
October 25, 2019 • ANGELUS • 3