Religion: Mary’s Beads

In an apostolic letter to the world’s Roman Catholics, Pope John XXIII last week made a plea for more frequent recitation of the rosary as a way of praying for peace. “The rosary of Mary,” he wrote, “becomes the elevation of a great public and universal prayer for the ordinary and extraordinary needs of the Holy Church, of the nations and of the whole world.”

The Rose Garland. The popularity of the rosary is growing in the modern world, along with increased devotion to the Virgin Mary. The use of prayer beads recedes into the earliest years of Christianity. In the 4th century, Paul the Hermit tallied his 300 prayers a day by collecting 300 pebbles and discarding them one at a time. In the 11th century, Countess Godiva of Coventry, the celebrated ecdysiast, bequeathed to a certain statue of the Virgin Mary “the circlet of precious stones which she had threaded on a cord in order that by fingering them one after another she might count her prayers exactly.” In the 12th century, the prayer now known as the Hail Mary* came into general use, and the beads began to be associated with the Virgin and take on something like their present form. The rose is Mary’s flower, and the beads took their present name from the Latin rosarius: a garland of roses.

The Weapon. A set of rosary beads is divided into five groups called decades, with ten beads per decade. In saying the rosary, the user recites ten Hail Marys for each decade, meditating as he does so on a meaningful episode in the life of Christ or Mary, known as a “mystery.” Each decade begins with the Lord’s Prayer and ends with a Gloria (“Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end”). In a full recitation, which takes 20 minutes, the user goes around the rosary three times, and the Hail Marys, including the required extras, total 153. Rosaries are not necessarily beads; manufacturers of religious gadgetry, despite general church disapproval, peddle plastic counters and clickers with buttons to press and needles to point.

No.1 rosary promoter is big, broguish Father Patrick Peyton, who conducts mass rallies around the world to encourage the use of the rosary in family worship (“The family that prays together stays together”). In San Francisco last week, Father Peyton preached the rosary to some 250,000 people in Golden Gate Park; last year in South America he distributed 1,500,000 rosaries to the poor. Says he: “The rosary has accomplished many great wonders in the world. When recited in the family each day, it is the most powerful weapon in our armory today against the evils that beset us.”

*”Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”