Knots in My Rosary

 My friend, Mary took a quick look at this holy card and said, "Oh, I love Our Lady of Knots."  I must have been asleep because I didn't correct her.  Later, at home, I thought of her exclamation.  Looking at this holy card, I burst out laughing.  This is Our Lady of the Rosary giving St. Dominic a rosary.  This rosary does look like it has knots though.  I called her and told her to look at the holy card, again.

Sometimes my rosary does get knotted.  There's that.

Maybe Our Lady of Knots is making a Rosary.  

A Gospel Prayer

When people pray the Rosary, they meditate on particular stories of the life of Jesus and Mary.  But they are called mysteries.  Why? I don't know but they are.  Mysteries = Stories.

There are five images in the Joyful Mysteries: Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation, and the Finding of Jesus in the Temple.

There are five images in the Sorrowful Mysteries: Agony in the Garden, Scourging, Crowning with thorns, Carry the Cross, and Jesus' Death.

There are five Luminous Mysteries: Baptism of Jesus, Wedding at Cana, Preaching the Kingdom of God, Transfiguration, and the Eucharist.

There are five Glorious Mysteries: Resurrection, Ascension, Descent of the Holy Spirit, Assumption of Mary, and the Crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven.

Meditating upon these events in the lives of Jesus and Mary is why the Rosary is called a Gospel Prayer.

Pray for our Country

I invite you to pray with me, for our country.  We will pray a rosary every day until Oct. 7th, the Feast of our Lady of the Rosary.  Go to this site for more information: https://www.novenaforournation.com/

Our Lady of the Rosary

Mary the dawn, Christ the Perfect Day;
Mary the gate, Christ the Heavenly Way!

Mary the root, Christ the Mystic Vine;
Mary the grape, Christ the Sacred Wine!

Mary the wheat, Christ the Living Bread;
Mary the stem, Christ the Rose blood-red!

Mary the font, Christ the Cleansing Flood;
Mary the cup, Christ the Saving Blood!

Mary the temple, Christ the temple's Lord;
Mary the shrine, Christ the God adored!

Mary the beacon, Christ the Haven's Rest;
Mary the mirror, Christ the Vision Blest!

Mary the mother, Christ the mother's Son
By all things blest while endless ages run.
                                                          Amen.

Hail Mary

The entrance antiphon before today's Mass for the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary read:

Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among
women and blessed is
the fruit of your womb.  (Note ending punctuation.)

Some people automatically added "Jesus," as if they were praying a regular Hail Mary prayer.
But for centuries, the name of Jesus wasn't used there.  People just prayed the direct scripture quote when Elizabeth greeted Mary.  St. Bernardino of Siena, who had a special devotion to the holy name of Jesus, used it, and it caught on.

Here also is where many people add different various phrases.  If one wanted to focus on the mystery of that decade, they could add:

for the Nativity
...blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus, who was born in a humble stable.
and say it on each of the ten beads.

for the Crucifixion
...blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus, who suffered and died for our sins.
and say it on each of the ten beads.

Get the idea?

or special intentions
...blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus, whom I beg to help my son find work.
and say it on each of the ten beads.

...blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus, whom I ask to heal my sick child.
and say it on each of the ten beads

Although one might say this makes the rosary too long, you can't deny the fact that it keeps you focused on your praying.

Our Lady of the Rosary

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Rhenish_Master

October 7 is the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.  With this in mind, I meditated upon this famous picture known as Little Garden of Paradise, by an unknown artist, Rhenish Master, c. 1410.

Mary is seated in a garden.  Connect garden to Eden.  She is surrounded by flowers and a tall wall.
            Mary is wearing a crown.
            The baby is being tended to by young maidens.  Think Jesus being taught by angels. 
            St.  Michael (adorned in flowers and St. George in armor) sit talking.
            Flowers are everywhere, so are apples.  (Think Adam and Eve tasting the apple.)
            See the food on the table.  (altar)
Because of Mary, we can approach the Garden of Eden through her Son's sacrifice.  Do you see that little, tiny, man hiding in the dark shadows?. It's Satan.  See St. Michael's foot on him.
That's the tempter from the Garden of Eden

The first thing you see in this picture is the child, with light bouncing off Him.  Mary is the next focus your eyes will see.  But you have to really look to find that little insidious devil.

Don't be fooled.  Satan hangs around.          

Feast of Holy Lady of the Rosary

Our Lady Help of Christians, Pray for Us

Juan Luna

October 7th in our Liturgical Calendar is the day we celebrate the Feast Day of Our Lady of the Rosary.  This day commemorates the victory of the armies of Christendom over the armies of Islam.  G.K. Chesterton wrote a famous poem, entitled Lepanto, about the battle itself.  It is quite long, but here is the first stanza:
Lepanto: by G.K. Chesterton

WHITE founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;	5
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.	10
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Lepanto is the most complete victory ever won over the Ottoman Empire.  We Catholics know that the battle was won through the intercession of Our Lady.  The Pope at that time, Pius V, urged everyone to pray the Rosary.  The Rosary is a powerful prayer.  It is a contemplative, vocal, mental prayer that asks Mary's intercession to give us God's blessings.  In thanksgiving for the victory, Pius V instituted the feast day of Our Lady of Victory.  It started to be commemorated by the invocation "Help of Christians," inserted in the Litany of Loretto.

Other victories are attributed to the praying of the Rosary.  At Belgrade the Turks were defeated on the Feast of Our Lady ad Nives in 1716.   A second victory gained that year on the Octave of the Assumption determined Pope Clement XI to command the Feast of the Rosary to be celebrated by the universal Church. Leo XIII added the invocation "Queen of the most Holy Rosary, pray for us," to the Litany of Loretto. The Feast is in reality a great festival of thanksgiving for the signal and countless benefits bestowed on Christendom through the Rosary.


You can be confident that your trust in Mary will help you confront any problems that you may be facing.

Celebrating Our Lady of the Rosary

Second Try

Something Screwy happened to my posting on Oct. 7.  The wording run amuck over the entire page.  Anyway, whatever, WTF!  

Here it is:

Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary

Some consider me a pious, overly devotional, old bat.  Actually, I'm rather proud of those modifiers.  I'm proud because I've seen the others who also have those nomenclatures.  I consider that we old rosary fingering faithful, are the backbone of the Church.  We're the prayer warriors.  We're the intercessors for our families, parishes, diocese, country, and the Church.

We're prayer warriors and our weapons are our prayers.  Our most effective weapons is the Rosary.  The Rosary won the Battle of Lepanto.  Ever since St. Dominic spread the devotion, it has become the weapon of choice for us.  Pope Pius V asked everyone to pray the Rosary when the Turks attacked.  Pius V accredited Our Lady for the victory.

A century later the Rosary saved Vienna and Pope Innocent XI extended the feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary to the entire Church.  In 1716, Clement XI inscribed the feast on the calendar in gratitude for the victory won by Prince Eugene of Savoy at Peterwardein, on August 5, (Our Lady of the Snow).  This victory was followed by the siege of Corfu and Belgrade.  Do you get the point, yet?

St Dominic formalised the current Dominican Rosary prior to the Battle of Muret in 1213 (that battle was again won on 12 September - the day after the mysterious 9/11) when he prayed for Count Simon de Montfort and his 700 knights as they sallied forth against a huge army of 50,000 Albigensians.
Thus the day was won and the tiny Catholic army triumphed over the huge heretic army. Again, another great victory obtained by the all-powerful Rosary of our Lady.

Small wonder, then, that our Lady has so often appeared and asked her children to pray theHoly Rosary for victory and peace, as she did to St Bernarde of Lourdes (St Bernadette) and later to the little shepherds at Fatima in 1917 during the Great War.

I mentioned all this to impress you.  I could have listed: personal conversions, regaining health, obtaining favors, selling homes, buying cars, and numerous other personal objectives that I credit to Our Lady of the Rosary.  But those don't impress anybody but myself.    Hence the emphasis on the military victories.

But you get the idea.

Thanks to us pious, overly devotional, old bats praying the Rosary, our world has survived. We old prayer warriors most certainly will die, but our Rosaries won't.  These beads that we carry in our purses and pockets, are fingered continually.  The Aves we finger are prayed continually around the world 24/7, by other old faithful fools.  We will carry the day, just as we did on all those military victories.  

Let us give thanks to the intercession of Our Lady, on this her feast day.

h/t http://romanchristendom.blogspot.com/2007/10/our-lady-of-victory-when-rosary-beat.html

Veritas! St. Esuperanzio is the Guy

"The Atta Girl" Award goes to Therese.     She researched the answer and found out that,


 "She [Madonna] bends forward to give a pearl rosary to St. Dominic...behind him St. Thomas and to the extreme left is the Magdalen....the child holds out his arms towards the model of the town held up the towns patron Saint Esuperanzio who kneels opposite to Dominic, forming with him, the putti (little angels) and the Madonna, a well arranged pyramidal composition..S. Esuperanzio wears a mitre, a purplish pink mantle and maniples, and a hood of a cloth of gold upon which is embroidered the Coronation of the Virgin. Behind him stands a nun St. Sperandia with lilies and a crucifix in her hands and beside her to the extreme right St. Peter Martyr...under the lichen-covered stone platform at the Madonna's feet a playful putto gathers up handfuls of rose-petals from a wicker basket and scatters them like a meteor shower (I like this analogy!) over St. Dominic. [footnote -- it is still custom in Central Italy at least to strew rose-petals on Corpus Domini.] Another putto presents a rose to St. Sperandia and the infant John points up to the Christ Child ...above...from the rose hedges branches hang, like Japanese lanterns, fifteen tondi, each containing a picture..although wonderful in themselves they must be looked at apart from the rest of the work for together the effect is not satisfactory.
        The lower part of the picture containing the Madonna and the saints is ...unrivaled amongst Lotto's works for its cool shawdows and general town..the last scene in the tondi deserves special attention..The Madonna prostrates herself in space, spearated by seems an endless stretch of ether from Christ and God the father who are crowning her. Lotto attains here a sublimity which is rare elsewhere in painting and which can be compared to Milton only. The gulf between the human and the Divine has never been indicated with more spiritual suggestiveness. One need only look at these Cingnoli Tondi and then at Titians Religion Succoured by Spain or even his Trinity to see that genuine religious feeling inspires the one painter and mere compliance the other...Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism by Bernhard Berensonhttp://books.google.com/bo

oks?id=GEe7APDiPfkC&lpg=PA207&dq=Sant+Esuperanzio+lotto&pg=PA209#v=onepage&q&f=false

Mystery solved.  Thanks Therese.  I owe you one.

The Answer to Who's this Guy?

                   Saint Pius V.

That's the answer to my previous post,  "Do you know this guy?"

Being a Dominican, of course I know who Pius V is.  But I associate him with implementing the Council of Trent, with being the model for Popes wearing white, for excommunicating Queen Elizabeth I, and for being instrumental in winning the Battle of Lepanto.

And if only I would have put a little more thought into my history, I would have tied the Rosary with winning the Battle of Lepanto.  Of course, what a dope I am!  Of course, Pius V loved the Rosary.  He credited the winning of Lepanto to praying the Rosary.

I'd like to thank Bernice, aka Marie Cecile from Soulful Longings for tickling my memory.  And to my long distance friend, Therese for kicking me in the a**.

Bernice wrote:  A Dominican priest named Michele Ghisleri ascended to the papacy in 1566, becoming the first Dominican pope. Styling himself Pius V, the new pontiff zealously promoted the Rosary, setting up the first official standards for its practice. In 1569, he officially approved the five-decade Rosary and the Fifteen Sacred Mysteries in a papal bull titled Consueverent Romani Pontifices.


Therese expanded: 

The famous Dominican Pius the V, champion of praying the Rosary to win the Battle of Lepanto, he has a picture of our Lady of Guadeloupe on the hood of his garment in the picture" The reason? - "Before departing from the Genoese port, Don John of Austria was presented by Philip II of Spain, who in turn had received from the Archbishop of Mexico City, a picture of Our Lady of Guadeloupe painted in 1570 and touched to the original. The Image was placed in the chapel of the Admiral’s vessel and together with the Genoese Andrea Doria, an invocation for protection was previous to the expedition expressed before the Image of Our Lady. Throughout the battle when the situation was unfavorable for the Catholics, the Admiral knelt before the Image and pleaded for Our Lady’s intercession. This same Image is today kept enshrined in the Church of San Stefano in Aveto, Italy. Reliable historical sources state that at a certain critical point,"http://catholicsouthernfront.wordpress.com/chapter-925-our-lady-of-the-rosary-

at-the-battle-of-lepanto/

I get by with a little bit of help from my friends.  Deo Gratias.