Transcript

Christians have prayed the Lord's Prayer from the beginning.

One of the other prayers that Christians have prayed from the very beginning is what we have come to know as the Hail Mary.

Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and this is Ascension Presents.

Where do we get the rosary?

We take part, half that prayer from scra- Sacred Scripture, where we say, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

Now, those are words from Luke's Gospel.

As the angel Gabriel appears to Mary, he says those words, Hail full of grace, or, Hail, highly favored one.

And then when Mary visits Elizabeth, she says, Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

The last part of the prayer, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, it's the expression of the heart of every believer.

And the heart of every believer is, I have been given a mom from the cross.

As Jesus is on the cross, he looks at his beloved disciple, John, he looks at his mom, and he says to his mother, Behold your son, and says to John, to the beloved disciple, Behold your mother.

Scripture says from that hour, he took her into his home.

So that sense of from the cross, Jesus gave us his mom as our mom, because we're all beloved disciples.

First of all, we have Christians who longed to pray.

Christians who wanted to pray and wanted to make prayer a part of their daily lives, and so you have some who joined monasteries, some who went into the wilderness, some who became nuns and, and they cloistered themselves off from the world and, and they dedicated their lives to prayer.

And so they would gather every day, and some of these monks would pray all 150 psalms every single day.

Now, people around them are saying, Hey, how do we pray like you pray?

Some of these monks and nuns who were in convents and monasteries would say, Well, you don't have access to the Scriptures on a daily basis like we do.

You don't, and if you did, you wouldn't be able to read necessarily, but you can pray every day.

At any moment of the day, you can sanctify every moment.

Remember, Saint Paul said, he said to pray always, pray unceasingly.

And so how about this?

How about you pray the Lord's Prayer as you go about your day?

How about you pray the Hail Mary as you go about your day?

How about you pray even a phenomenal prayer called the Jesus Prayer?

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

And in order to keep track of those prayers, you can, uh, tie knots in a, in a rope, right?

And so as you're working, as you're going about your daily business, you have this, this rope with knots in it and you pray the Our Father, the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Jesus Prayer a number of times throughout the day.

One good number of times would be, if there's 150 psalms, how about this?

How about pray the Lord's Prayer 150 times?

Or the Hail Mary, or the Jesus Prayer 150 times?

So you have this e- evolution, right, of people who are praying, getting into a pattern of prayer.

You might say, Well, that sounds like kind of mindless repetition, just us saying the prayer over and over again.

And in some ways you might be right.

We'll talk about that later as well, not in this video, but in a diff- in a different video.

But what you have people doing is, I'm taking the prayer that I would have in this, in the quiet of my room, and I'm bringing it in this silent, unobtrusive, but powerful way out into my life.

As I'm walking down the street and I'm just like, 'No one else knows this, but I'm just, I'm praying that Jesus Prayer, I'm praying the Lord's Prayer, I'm praying the Hail Mary.' Now, as things evolved, sometimes people divided those up and said, Okay, well, doing 150 in a row might be a little rough.

Like, I might kind of actually lose focus.

So how about you reflect on a scene from the Lord's life?

Now again, over the course of hundreds of years, leading up to about 1200 where there's a man named Saint Dominic, and Saint Dominic, uh, and Saint Simon Stock, these, these two kind of like pioneers or champions of the rosary as we know it right now, would say, Okay, how about this?

You have 150 Hail Marys throughout the course of the day.

You can divide those into groups of 10.

Start off that group of 10, or a decade, right, 10, decade, with an Our Father.

Close it with a Glory Be to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, right?

And then each one of those decades, reflect on a scene from the Lord's life.

Which led us to have, uh, the joyful mysteries, the sorrowful mysteries, and the glorious mysteries.

If you add all of those Hail Marys up, you have 150, just like you have 150 psalms.

Christians did this, again, from the 300s, they had those, those prayers on those beads, or prayers on those knots.

And now here in 1200 with Saint Simon Stock and Saint Dominic, you had Christians who were regularly saying, Okay, I'm gonna reflect on the Lord's life.

So here's one of the joyful mysteries, the nativity, right?

Christmas.

I mean, how often do we think of Christmas?

How often do we pray about Christmas in our normal daily lives unless we're praying the rosary?

And then at least once every couple days, maybe even every day, you get to reflect on the mystery of the incarnation, the mystery of God humbling himself and entering into our lives, or even the crucifixion.

Sometimes we just leave that for Lent or leave that for Easter Holy Week.

When you're praying the rosary, you get to reflect on that deep, profound gift of love that Jesus gave to the world.

And so that's how people began to pray the rosary as we know it.

At one point in history, the rosary was a powerful tool against a culture that was changing dramatically.

At one point in history, the rosary was a powerful tool.

In fact, it was the weapon in the hands of Christians that was able to defeat an onslaught that was attacking Christian Europe.

There was a, if, if you know the story, there was, uh, a massive Muslim invasion of Europe.

After hundreds of years of, of Muslims taking over the Middle East and North Africa and all these places that had been Christian, violently overtaking these places, here is this Muslim navy that was attacking Europe and was threatening to gain a foothold in Europe and to overrun the entire continent of Europe.

And so the Pope at the time said, Okay, Christians, here's the deal.

Um, they're more powerful than we are.

They're, they are, uh, more highly trained than, than we are.

What do we have?

Well, we have a mom that was given to us from the cross, and so let's turn to the rosary.

And the Pope said, Let's pray to our lady that we have victory over this invading fleet.

And so there's this battle called the Battle of Lepanto, and you can, you can look it up.

There's G.K.

Chesterton had written this kind of like epic poem about the Battle of Lepanto.But essentially, the short story is this: All these Christians devoted themselves to praying for victory by asking Our Lady for help.

In the midst of this battle when the Muslim invading forces were guaranteed to win, two things happened.

One is, the winds shifted, remarkably, miraculously even, and there was this cloud or fog cover that enabled the Christian fleet to go around the Muslim fleet and ultimately have victory.

The pope credited that praying of the rosary and the intercession of Our Lady to the victory.

And so, there was originally established the Feast of Our Lady of Victory in the month of October, and that, that now has become Our Lady of the Rosary.

But originally, it's Our Lady of Victory, because why?

Because here we are as Christians.

We are most likely not called to take up arms, like physical violence arms, against a good culture.

That's most likely not what we're called to do, any of us.

But we all are called to stand against the culture that is anti-God, to stand against a culture that is anti-Christ, to stand against a culture that is anti-life, and to do what?

To do what our ancestors did, which is to take up the rosary and ask, through the intercession of Our Lady, ask the Lord for victory.

Again, this doesn't mean violence.

What this does mean is taking a stand and doing something.

And the remarkable thing is every Christian can do something by simply taking up the rosary and praying.

Here's the last thing.

The rosary was massively important in my life.

When I first had an encounter with the Lord Jesus in the sacrament of confession, I was immediately drawn to the rosary.

So Mary has had a massive, massive role.

So I prayed the rosary almost every day or wanted to pray the rosary every day in high school, into college, and at some point, I just kind of let it go, because there was other ways to pray too, and, and that's fine.

A lot of times we can, we can do that.

And then a number of years ago, we had this speaker had came here, the mom of one of our students.

She came and gave a talk.

She was gonna give a talk on pro-life, but instead she gave a talk on Mary, on the rosary.

And one of the things she noted was this.

She noted that whenever Mary has appeared in any apparition, any modern day apparition, at least the ones that I know about and the ones that she knows about, Mary has always had a message, and that message is to repent, or of course the message is to do penance, right?

To fast when we need to and to deny ourselves things.

But the third thing, third message was to pray the rosary.

Oh yeah, of course I know that.

I know that Our Lady has told us, you know, to repent, has told us to do penance, has told us to pray the rosary.

But she made the point and she connected the dots for me.

She said, Okay, so here's the deal.

Mary, if she shows up, right, if she appears, she's not doing that on her own.

She's doing that because she is sent by God directly to this people.

And not only is she sent by God directly, the message she's giving is not her message.

This is the message that God wants his people to know.

And that made me stop 'cause she said, That means that doing penance, repenting, and praying the rosary is what God is asking of all of his people.

That if Jesus is our Lord, if God in heaven is our Father, and if Jesus gave us his mother as our mother, then he's asking us through Mary to pray the rosary.

Which means that in some levels, even though of course it's still a private devotion and even that revelation is, is private revelation, there's a little bit more urgency and a little bit more weight to that message.

Because if that apparition, if those apparitions or appearances of Mary are real and that message is real, then that message is from the Lord God himself.

That he wants us, he wants us to ask for Mary's intercession for our lives, for the, for the sake of our culture and for the sake of his church.

And for me, that just convicted my heart and I was like, Oh wow, I had really been lax when it came to the rosary.

I need to pick that back up again.

I need to pray for myself, my loved ones, for you.

I need to pray for our culture.

I need to pray for this world.

I need to pray for those who, who walk in darkness that they can see a great light.

So that's my invitation, passing on the message of Mary to all of us.

Anyways, from all of us here at Ascension Presents, my name's Father Mike.

God bless.