October is Rosary Month
The students and staff at St Edmunds Catholic Academy are invited to the Chapel on a Tuesday evening, after school, to look at how to say the Rosary and learn more about this great ‘tool’ for prayers and meditation. The Rosary beads are provided. Why not come along…
October 7th is the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary and the month of October is traditionally the month of the rosary. Why did the Blessed Mother ask us to pray the rosary at many of her approved apparitions such as at Fatima? Why should we pray at all?
We know that God is perfect and perfectly happy, so he doesn’t need our prayers or affections… but he loves us and wants us to be happy. He wants to have a loving relationship with us both now and for eternity. God is potentially the greatest source of happiness we can possibly have, as God is the greatest, the most beautiful, most loving, all-powerful and all-knowledgeable being in existence
Prayer is a way to help us get in touch with God and to develop a relationship with him. In prayer we not only talk with God, but God communicates with us. As we continue to pray, our relationship with God grows, and we are transformed more into the people we are meant to be.
So why pray the rosary?
One reason the Blessed Mother asked us to pray the rosary might be because it can benefit anyone at any stage of the spiritual life from beginners to advanced. The rosary is a vocal prayer, a meditation and can lead to contemplation as Pope John Paul II mentioned in his encyclical Rosary of the Virgin Mary.
“A path of contemplation … But the most important reason for strongly encouraging the practice of the Rosary is that it represents a most effective means of fostering among the faithful that commitment to the contemplation of the Christian mystery which I have proposed in the Apostolic Letter Novo Millenio Ineuente as a genuine ‘training in holiness’: ‘What is needed is a Christian life distinguished above all in the art of prayer’. Inasmuch as contemporary culture, even amid so many indications to the contrary, has witnessed the flowering of a new call for spirituality, due also to the influence of other religions, it is more urgent than ever that our Christian communities should become ‘genuine schools of prayer’. The Rosary belongs among the finest and most praiseworthy traditions of Christian contemplation.”