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Dominican Rosary Pilgrimage

A National Pilgrimage Devoted to Christ and Our Lady

PRAYER

Are You a Eucharistic Soul?

Diversity is baked into reality. Rocks, plants, and animals adorn the world in a vast array of species. The existence of many things and many kinds of things displays the manifold and infinite perfections of the Creator. Just as this diversity exists in nature, so it exists in the order of the supernatural, that is, in the order of grace. Saint Paul teaches this point in his letter to the Ephesians: 

But grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift…and his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

(Eph 4:7,11-13)

One particular grace that God gives to souls is a special love for the Eucharist. This special love goes beyond the ordinary love for the Blessed Sacrament to which God calls every Christian. This love is an extraordinary kind of love—a desire to be with Jesus, that is, to abide in his Presence and to share the thoughts and secrets of the heart, as one friend to another. Before he instituted the sacrament of his Presence under the veil of bread and wine, the Son of God first called men and women to intimate friendship with Himself as the Word made flesh.

One such recipient of this special love is Saint John, the beloved disciple. Jesus called John to a special vocation, the vocation to console his Sacred Heart with his friendship. The youngest of the apostles, John understood Jesus and consoled him with his loyal presence, faith, and confidence. It was John who rested his head close to the breast of Christ at the Last Supper, closely listening to his beloved teacher and friend. It was John who, when all the rest of the apostles had abandoned Jesus, remained with his friend at the Cross, offering his silent looks of faith, love, and trust. And it was this beloved friend of the Lord who, when unable to haul the miraculous catch of fish into the boat with Peter, recognized the resurrected Jesus on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias saying, “It is the Lord!” (John 21:7). This grace of intimate friendship between John and Jesus knew no bounds, such that when Jesus ascended to the Father and no longer could be seen in the flesh, John undoubtedly continued to keep company with His Lord and God, hidden now under the appearances of bread and wine. 

Jesus continues to give this same grace of intimate friendship today. He calls all souls to Himself, but there are some to whom Jesus offers the grace to be his close friends, much like Saint John. These close friends are those who feel drawn to keep company with Jesus, to abide in his presence, to console him with their friendship. These friends go to the Eucharist, the sacrament of Christ’s presence. They go to the Eucharist to find their master, their teacher, their Lord, their friend. There, these friends keep Jesus company, silently loving him. Perhaps we can call these close friends of Jesus “Eucharistic souls.” They are men and women in the Church of every time, kind, and place. Their value to the Church comes not from the diversity of their circumstances, but rather from the measure of Christ’s gift to them for the building up of the body of Christ.

This article was originally published in the dominicanajournal.org and was written by Br. Raphael Arteaga, O.P..

Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange on the Rosary

From The Mother of the Savior and Our Interior Life

The French Dominican Fr. Reginald Garrigou- Lagrange, O.P., was a leading 20th Century Thomist who directed the doctoral dissertation of the future Pope St. John Paul II. His thought and piety remain influential throughout the Dominican Order and the Church.

The Rosary is a Credo: not an abstract one, but one concretized in the life of Jesus Who came down to us from the Father and Who ascended to bring us back with Himself to the Father. It is the whole of Christian dogma in all its splendor and elevation, brought to us that we may fill our minds with it, that we may relish it and nourish our souls with it.

This makes the Rosary a true school of contemplation. Early theologians have compared the movement of the soul in contemplation to the spiral in which certain birds—the swallow, for example—move when they wish to attain to a great height. The joyful mysteries lead to the Passion, and the Passion to the door of heaven. The Rosary well understood is, therefore, a very elevated form of prayer which makes the whole of dogma accessible to all.

It takes us from the midst of our too human interests and joys and makes us think of those which center on the coming of the Savior. It takes us from our meaningless fears, from the sufferings we bear so badly, and reminds us of how much Jesus has suffered for love of us and teaches us to follow Him by bearing the cross which divine providence has sent us to purify us. It takes us finally from our earthly hopes and ambitions and makes us think of the true object of Christian hope—eternal life and the graces necessary to arrive there.

The Rosary is more than a prayer of petition. It is a prayer of adoration inspired by the thought of the Incarnate God, a prayer of reparation in memory of the Passion of Our Savior, a prayer of thanksgiving that the glorious mysteries continue to reproduce themselves in the uninterrupted entry of the elect into glory.

The Best Prayer for Men

By Fr. Patrick Mary Briscoe, O.P.

A version of this article appeared in the online journal, Dominicana.

Growing up, I’d occasionally catch my father as he finished praying the Rosary early on Saturday mornings or notice he’d left his handsome set of beads lying out on a coffee table. I had the blessing of his example. Other men know their fathers have placed a Rosary in their locker at work (try and find a Catholic firefighter who doesn’t have either a Rosary or a saint’s medal) or even just keep one in their pocket, where from time to time they’ll pause and touch the beads. But for those men who haven’t “seen” or “heard,” how do we make sense of the Rosary as a manly devotion?

1. The Rosary is covert. A fierce point of intimidation of being a man of faith in our culture is the fear that we will amount to being hypocrites (and we know how much Jesus loved that…). In the face of our own weakness, we want to be authentic about who we are, what we’re capable of, and what we believe. Rather than broadcasting or projecting a false image of ourselves as mighty saints, men prefer to keep things on the down low. The problem is this principle of authenticity—which is truly noble—can be our undoing. When we’re not grounded in something solid, we’ll drift away. We’re not all called to some kind of grandiose witness, like martyrdom or preaching, but we do need to be faithful. The Rosary offers a structured program for building up the foundation of faith in our souls in secret, so that when the storms come our hearts will be strong enough to be true.

2. The Rosary arms us for spiritual warfare. The fact of the matter is that spiritual life is war. St. Paul puts it this way, “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). To contend in the battle, we must put on the armor of Light (Rom. 13:12)! Dominican friars wear the Rosary on the left side, the side which bore the sword for knights of old. In the battle of the spiritual life, prayer is the only weapon, and it must be used. Frequently. Unceasingly. Devotion to the Rosary reclaimed the life of the 19th-century Italian lawyer Bartolo Longo (who had become entrapped in the world of the occult and often dreamt of taking his own life), and without a doubt, devotion to the Rosary will help us overcome the evils which plague us. The temptations and cycles of sin of the 21st century do not own us, for the Rosary narrates the greatest conquest of all time: the victory of life and light over sin and death.

3. The Rosary sanctifies our contemplative side. Like fixing things around the house, solving crises at work or otherwise designing and building, men love to muse over problems. I’ve heard it said before that during time set aside for prayer people should clear their minds, so that they can be totally focused on God. That seems unnatural to me. It’s been my experience that God wants us to set before Him the mess and mud of our lives, not hide it from Him. This is the very glory of Christianity—the Incarnational principle—that God would condescend to our world and sanctify it, lift it up to Him. The mysteries of the Rosary lead us to think and reflect on the stuff of our lives, while simultaneously giving us an opportunity to hand our struggles over to the Lord. When we reflect on the mysteries of the Rosary, we join our lives to Christ’s. By praying the Rosary, God pierces the hardened shell of our hearts and opens up a place for Him. He will speak to us, to the problems of our own lives, through the Rosary.

4. Jesus says so. Ever since second-grade religion class, Jesus is usually the right answer. Without getting all theological, we can simply say: men should pray the Rosary because He told us to. From the Cross Jesus tells St. John, “Behold your Mother!” (Jn. 19:27). That command to “behold” is not St. John’s alone—it’s ours, too. To behold, to take in, to bask in, to be attentive to, to delight in: this is the command. Through Mary’s intercession at the Cross and in the Rosary, Jesus arranges that the treasury of graces associated with His Immaculate Mother may be opened to us and poured out on us. But we’re left to seek her, to behold her.

God Never Lets Us Go

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By Father Pius Pietrzyk, O.P.

On May 23rd, 2008, I was ordained a priest of Jesus Christ. I like to think that my Nana—my Irish grandmother—is having a great laugh right now. She always hoped that I would become a priest. I thought about it a great deal when I was in high school. I even decided I would become a priest, in that half-hearted way teenagers make any long-term decision. But like so many young people, the lure of ambition and the prestige of the world pulled me away from the Church. A career in the law became my goal, and God took a back seat, and I was content to keep Him there.

But, try as we might, God never lets us go. “Where can I hide from your spirit? From your presence, where can I flee? … If I fly with the wings of dawn and alight beyond the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand hold me fast” (Psalm 139). I think the same can be said of grandmothers.

It was a great sadness to me when my Nana died. It was April 30th, weeks before my college graduation—and I was to be the first of her grandchildren to graduate from college. But she left me something very valuable; she left me her Rosary. It was not valuable in the way the world measures value, but only so in the way a grandson values the keepsake of a dearly missed grandparent.

It was valuable in another way, too. That Rosary was priceless in that it was like a cord passed from God through my Nana’s hands to me. Years later, after I did graduate from law school, as I began to embark on a promising career in a prestigious Chicago law firm, I discovered that Rosary again. But this time, I began to pray it.

As I did, God gave a firm tug on that cord, and slowly brought me back to Him. It was in that time of prayer that I discovered that as happy as I was being a lawyer, the Lord wanted for me an even greater happiness. And so, at the dawn of my career, I left all the things the world told me were valuable, to serve God in his Church.

While all of this is ultimately attributable to God’s grace, I think my Nana’s prayers were a part of it, too. Some time after I became a Dominican—and after I took the name ‘Pius,’ after the Dominican saint Pope Saint Pius V—I learned a surprising fact. The Church celebrates the feast day of my new patron Saint Pius on April 30th, which is the exact same day my Nana left this world. I like to think that coincidence was my Nana’s way of saying “I told you so.” So, if you were at my ordination, and you heard the echo of faint laughter, it was probably just my Nana, happy that I finally realized she was right all along.