the rosary - the word among us.pdf

The Rosary Handbook A Guide for ers, Old-Timers, and Those In Between Contents Introduction 7 The Rosary and You—A Perfect Match Chapter 1 15 What’s in It for Me: Why You Should Pray the Rosary Chapter 2 29 Separating Fact from Myth: The Origins and History of the Rosary Chapter 3 43 More Than Just a String of Beads: The Prayers of the Rosary Chapter 4 69 Moments for Meditation: The Twenty Mysteries of the Rosary Chapter 5 131 Getting Down to Basics: How to Pray the Rosary Appendix 139 Putting It into Practice: Making the Rosary Your Own 7 INTRODUCT ION The Rosary and You— A Perfect Match My earliest memories of the Rosary go back to the school year of 1953–54, when I was in the third grade. This was the first year that I attended a Catholic school, which happened to be Saints Peter and Paul School in the small, north-central Idaho town of Grangeville. Benedictine Sisters from the Monastery of St. Gertrude, from nearby Cottonwood, Idaho, served as our teachers. Our parents enrolled my younger sister and me in this little Catholic school even though we weren’t Catholic. Less than two years later, however, the four of us—Mom and Dad included—found ourselves leaning over the baptismal font in the back of Saints Peter and Paul Church, as the pastor, Father Thomas Lafey, poured the waters of baptism over our heads. For me, it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Catholi - cism—and, as I was to discover only later—with the Rosary. A few years ago, I had occasion to return to Saints Peter and Paul School, and I could still pinpoint the place in the school’s gymnasium where I stood, one May morning—May being the month of the Blessed Virgin Mary—as a non-Catholic third grader, when one of the sisters designated me, along with some sixty other fidgeting kids, to represent one of the beads of a rosary. We were going to e, Sister said, a “living rosary.” (Throughout this book, I capital