The rosary is a prayer Catholics use to meditate upon key events in the life of Christ. We also offer up our time praying the rosary for various prayer intentions. Our Lady has asked us repeatedly, especially at Fatima, to pray the rosary often.
There are few things more “Catholic” than the praying of the rosary. And, like all things Catholic, the rosary has a long history.
The rosary consists mostly of “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers.” It also involves using beads to count prayers. It has sets of mysteries that we meditate upon as we pray in “decades,” sets of 10 beads. Here, I will briefly walk through how all this came together.
The “Hail Mary” is made up of the words of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary (“Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you”) and the words of Elizabeth to Mary (“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”). These two were combined to form a single prayer sometime around the 6th Century. By the 11th Century the petition, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,” was added, thus completing the “Hail Mary” we know.
The “Our Father,” of course, came to us directly from Jesus who instructed us to “Pray then like this: Our Father who art in heaven ….”
Pebbles and beads were used by Christians to track how many prayers had been said as far back as the 3rd Century. An Egyptian hermit, for example, offered 300 penitential prayers a day and tracked his progress using pebbles. Before long, however, beads came into use. It’s easier to use beads on a string than a big bucket of rocks! St. Jerome, by the 4th to 5th Centuries, used prayer beads to count. These beads were soon known as paternoster beads, as they were used to pray the “Pater Noster,” the Our Father, repeatedly.
Praying the 150 Psalms in community has long been an important part of life for religious men and women. But to do this, they needed to know Latin. Many did not, and some were permitted (around the 9th Century) to substitute 150 Our Fathers for the Psalms. These religious used beads to count their prayers. But, carrying around a string of 150 beads was cumbersome. Instead, they used strings of 50 beads, which they would pray three times. This is getting closer to the rosary, which has the 50 “Hail Mary” beads.
The Hail Mary began to be prayed on these sets of beads in the 10th and 11th Centuries. Soon, they added an Our Father after every ten Hail Marys, to break up the monotony. The Cistercians and Carthusians around this time created a “Marian Psalter” that consisted of reciting the Hail Mary 150 times, but there were no mysteries attached to them.
Here we see the rosary taking shape: 150 Hail Marys divided into “decades,” groups of ten, separated by the Our Father.
Then, St. Dominic arrived on the scene. In 1208, he went into a forest to pray for guidance in his fight against the Albigensian heresy. Mary appeared and spoke to him. She said “Wonder not that until now you [St. Dominic] have obtained so little fruit by your labors; … When God willed to renew the face of the earth, He began by sending down on it the fertilizing rain of the Angelic Salutation. Therefore, preach my Psalter.”
St. Dominic was familiar with the Marian Psalter, of using beads to pray 150 Hail Marys. But, Mary told him to “preach” with it. To that point, the Marian Psalter had no meditations on the life of Christ attached to it. It wasn’t much of a teaching tool. Mary then revealed to Dominic the specific mysteries, events from the life of Christ, that should be “preached” for each of the 15 decades of the “Marian Psalter.” The mysteries Mary provided were the answer to Dominic’s prayers. Focusing on the Incarnation, Passion, and triumph of Jesus, the mysteries were perfect for combatting the heresy St. Dominic was working to oppose.
St. Dominic then went into towns where this heresy was widespread and preached about each mystery, followed by the praying of 10 Hail Marys. His teaching became much more effective with the help of Our Lady.
In the 13th and 14th Centuries, some came to think of offering a “Hail Mary” to Our Lady as handing her a rose. Eventually, this Dominican “Marian Psalter,” with its 15 mysteries, came to be called the “rosary,” a word indicating a wreath or bouquet of flowers.
We can see, then, how the rosary took shape over centuries and how Mary herself, through St. Dominic, gave us the first three sets of mysteries. Pope St. John Paul II then added the fourth set, the luminous mysteries, in the year 2002.
For more information about this topic, I recommend the book Champions of the Rosary:
The History and Heroes of a Spiritual Weapon, by Donald H. Calloway, MIC.
Fr. Signalness is pastor of Queen of the Most Holy Rosary in Stanley and St. Ann in Berthhold. If you have a question you were afraid to ask, now is the time to ask it! Simply email your question to [email protected]with the “Question Afraid to Ask” in the subject line.