The Importance of the Family Rosary and The Power of the Rosary (2024)

The Importance of the Family Rosary
& The Power of the Rosary

The Importance of the Family Rosary

This article is taken from the booklet "Our Glorious Faith and How To Lose It" written byFr. Hugh Thwaites, S.J. It contains different stories of how we can loseour faith but this paper will deal only with the Holy Rosary. Fr. Thwaites'words on this subject are as follows:

Without delay now, I want to talk about my theme. It seems to me thata principal cause of the loss of faith is the dropping off in the practiceof the family rosary.

In Austria, after World War II, there was a complete collapse of vocations.One year, apparently, no one at all entered the seminaries. So the bishopsheld a synod, to find out how it could be that this had happened. The conclusionthey reached was that the war had so disrupted family life that the centuries-oldpractice of the rosary in the home had stopped, and had just not startedup again. This is my experience, too; when the rosary goes, the faith sooncollapses.

I remember someone telling me of a friend of his, a great Catholic,the pillar of the parish, whose children had all lapsed, one after theother. They had all fallen away from the sacraments and from attendingMass. So I said to him, "I wouldn't mind betting that your friendhad been brought up to recite the family rosary when he was a boy, andthat his children haven't." The next time I saw him, he said thatthis was indeed true. His friend had recited the family rosary at homewhen he was a boy, and when he had got married and started his own familythey all said the rosary. But then, one evening when they were about tostart the rosary, one of the children switched on the television, and thatwas that. The custom of the family rosary was dropped, and in due course,they gave up the practice of the faith.

After this life, that one unrebuked action will be seen to have affectedthe eternity of many people. God sent His Mother to Fatima to tell us thatwe had to say the rosary every day. There were no other prayers She askedus to say. Accordingly, we should do what She asked.

A layman I met once who did not say his rosary told me that he readthe breviary every day. That is fine. It is what priests have to do. Itis the prayer of the Church. So in a way it is better than the rosary.But it is not what Our Lady asked for. She asked for the rosary. If a mothersends her child to the shop for a bottle of milk, and he comes back insteadwith ice cream, is she pleased? In a way, ice cream is better than milk,but it is not what she asked for.

In that most holy home at Nazareth, do you think that Our Lady hadto ask for anything twice? If we want in any way to be like Jesus, we mustdo what His Mother asks. If we do not, can we expect things to go right?We cannot with impunity disobey the Mother of God. She knows better thanwe the dangers of this spiritual warfare. She sees more clearly than wedo the dangers that beset us. She warns us: You must say your rosary everyday.

If the garage mechanic warns you that your car needs repairing or elseit will break down, surely you would heed that warning. If the gas gaugewarns you that you need more gas, do you do nothing about it? And if OurLady comes to Fatima and tells us, not just once but six times, that wemust say the rosary every day, do we disregard that warning? If we do,we have only ourselves to blame when we find that our children have lapsedfrom the faith.

I know that Fatima is only a private revelation, but nevertheless theChurch has endorsed it, and that makes it rash for us to disregard it.If the Church informs us that Our Lady really did come to Fatima and tellus these things, then we must harken to her words. It really seems to methat those Catholics who do not take Fatima seriously and say the rosaryevery day in their homes are very akin to the Jews who laughed at Jeremiah.If God sends us His prophets and we do not take them seriously � well,we have the whole of the Old Testament to tell us what happens as a result.But at Fatima, God sent us, not His prophets, but His Immaculate Mother.

So I think that the abandonment of the family rosary is a main reasonwhy so many Catholics have lost the faith. It seems to me that the Churchof the future is going to consist solely of those families who have beenfaithful to the rosary. But there will be vast numbers of people whosefamilies used to be Catholic.

In my work of going round visiting homes, I have seen this conclusionborne out time and again. Homes can be transformed by starting the recitationof the daily rosary. I remember a woman telling me that she could not thankme enough for having nagged her into starting it; it had united her familyas never before. And I remember another home where I called. There wasa strange tension there: the children were silent and the wife seemed withdrawn,but the husband was willing to start the family rosary. When I called backagain a couple of months later, the atmosphere was quite different. Thechildren were chatty and the wife was friendly, and the husband walkeddown the road with me afterwards and said how amazing it was that the homewas so much happier.

One reason, I think, why the daily rosary makes for a happy home, isthis. From what some possessed people have said, and from what some ofthe saints have said, it seems certain that demons fear the rosary. Itmakes their hair stand on end, so to speak. Holy water certainly drivesthem out, but they come back again. The daily rosary drives them out andkeeps them out. It is rather like living in an old house where there aremice everywhere. The only way to get rid of them is to bring cats. If youget a couple of cats, after a week or two there simply will not be anymore mice. Mice fear the very smell of cats. And in a home where the rosaryis said every day, after a time the demons realize they are impotent infront of Our Lady, and go elsewhere.

This must be one reason why, as they say, "the family that praystogether stays together." In that home, utterly free of evil spirits,there is an atmosphere one does not find outside. In a demon-infested citylike London, where I live, such a home is an oasis of God's grace, andpeople find a comfort and peace there which they enjoy greatly. We humanbeings are not meant to live in the company of demons, but with God andwith the angels and saints in heaven.

So, as I see it, in this effort we are making to keep the faith andpass it on, the practice of the rosary is absolutely indispensable. Whateverelse a person may do, even though they go to Mass every day, they stillneed to say the rosary in their home. It is the medicine our Mother hastold us to take, to keep our faith strong and healthy.

Page 2

The Power of the Rosary

The most holy Virgin in these last times in which we live has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the Rosary to such an extent that 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, of the families of the world, or of the religious communities, or even of the life of peoples and nations, 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. With the holy Rosary, we will save ourselves; we will sanctify ourselves; we will console our Lord, and obtain the salvation of many souls. Conversation between Sr. Lucy of Fatima and Fr. Fuentes, Dec. 26, 1957

"The Rosary is a powerful weapon to put the demons to flight and to keep oneself from sin�If you desire peace in your hearts, in your homes, and in your country, assemble each evening to recite the Rosary. Let not even one day pass without saying it, no matter how burdened you may be with many cares and labors." Pope Pius XI

"Among all the devotions approved by the Church, none has been so favored by so many miracles as the Rosary devotion." Pope Pius IX

"The Rosary is the most excellent form of prayer and the most efficacious means of attaining eternal life. It is the remedy for all our evils, the root of all our blessings. There is no more excellent way of praying." Pope Leo XIII

St. Dominic prayed to Our Lady that she would force the devils who possessed a man to reveal the truth about devotion to her. The devils were forced by Our Lady to reveal: "Now that we are forced to speak we must also tell you this: Nobody who perseveres in saying the Rosary will be damned, because she obtains for her servants the grace of true contrition for their sins and by means of this they obtain God's forgiveness and mercy."

Miracles of the Rosary:

Battle of Lepanto, 1571 - On Sunday, October 7, the Christian and Turkish fleets met in Lepanto Gulf, off the coast of Greece. The bitter battle finished with a brilliant victory of the Christians who where vastly outnumbered. That very evening Pope St. Pius V had at Rome a clear knowledge of this success. The same afternoon, the Confraternities of the Rosary, particularly in Rome, had marched through the streets in procession reciting the Rosary. This victory put an end to the naval power of the Turks and saved Christian Europe. To this day this victory has been attributed to the praying of the Rosary. The feast of �The Most Holy Rosary� is celebrated on October 7 now and the month of October is dedicated to the Most Holy Rosary.

Rosary Miracle at Hiroshima - August 6th, 1945 There was a home eight blocks (about 1 kilometer) from where the A-Bomb went off in Hiroshima Japan. This home had a church attached to it which was completely destroyed, but the home survived, and so did the eight German Jesuit missionaries who prayed the Rosary in that house faithfully every day. These men were missionaries to the Japanese people, they were non-military, but because Germany and Japan were allies during WWII they were permitted to live and minister within Japan during the war. Not only did they all survive with (at most) relatively minor injuries, but they all lived well past that awful day with no radiation sickness, no loss of hearing, or any other visible long term defects or maladies. Naturally, they were interviewed numerous times (Fr. Schiffer, a survivor, said over 200 times) by scientists and health care people about their remarkable experience and they say "we believe that we survived because we were living the message of Fatima. We lived and prayed the Rosary daily in that home." Of course the secular scientists are speechless and incredulous at this explanation - and they are sure there is some "real" explanation - but at the same time over 55 years later the scientists are still absolutely bamboozled when it comes to finding a plausible scenario to explain the missionaries� unique escape from the hellish power of that bomb.

Russians Pullout of Austria, 1948 - After World War ll, the Allies turned over Catholic Austria to communist Russia. For three years the Austrian people endured this tyranny. Then, a Franciscan priest, Father Petrus, remembered how the Christians although greatly outnumbered had defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto through the Rosary, and he launched a Rosary crusade. Through it 70,000 people, one tenth of the Austrian population, pledged to say the Rosary daily for the Soviets to leave their country. Austria was valuable to the Russians because of its strategic location, rich mineral deposits and oil reserves. Yet on May 13, 1955, the anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady at Fatima, the Russians signed the agreement to leave Austria, and they did so without one person being killed and without one shot being fired. It is the only time that the militant atheistic forces of Marxism have ever peacefully left a country in which they held power.Military strategists and historians are baffled as to why the Russians pulled out. But we are not - it was the power of the Rosary.

The Country That Saved Itself - Brazil 1962 - In 1962 there was a looming threat of communist takeover in Brazil. A woman there named Dona Amelia Bastos was known to have formed a Rosary rally among the Brazilian women there to do their part in opposing the looming threat. Their goal was simply to pray the Rosary in large groups asking the Virgin Mary for help in opposing the Communist takeover which the President of Brazil was leaning toward at the time. In Belo Horizonte 20,000 women reciting the Rosary aloud broke up a Communist rally. In Sao Paulo, 600,000 women praying the Rosary in one of the most moving demonstrations in Brazilian history, caused the President of Brazil to flee the country and not a single death was encountered, sparing the country from Communist takeover.

The above accounts are just a few of the countless examples of The Power of the Rosary!

www.olrl.org/misc/

Copies of this article available from:

Our Lady of the Rosary Library

11721 Hidden Creek Road

Prospect, KY 40059