Sixth Sunday of Easter

Dominica in Pasqua VI
5 May 2024

 My Kindergarten teacher, Sister Mary Samuel, taught my class the Rosary.  When we small kids naturally started putting the rosary over our heads, Sister told us gently: “Now children, we don’t treat it like jewelry, or something just to wear.  We treat it respectfully as something we use for prayer.”  After Sister’s example and lesson, it was a man whose dedication to Mary and the Rosary most stands out to me and has impacted me greatly.  That man was my maternal grandfather, Jack Ryan.  At the end of his life, in and out of consciousness, he would become agitated when he could no longer keep a grip on his Rosary.  My family discovered that if they taped the Rosary to his hand he would remain more calm.  Not discounting the great example of so many faithful women, for me the Rosary has always been a masculine form of prayer and a manly thing to do, thanks to my grandpa.

The month of May is typically devoted to Mary, to motherhood, and to Marian devotions.  As we are in May and have the May Crowing today, I want to promote the Rosary as a prayer for each of you to foster in your personal spiritual practice, to promote it as a prayer that should have a place in your home life (and which I especially encourage you men to lead), and I want to encourage you to join in praying the Rosary before Masses and to also get involved by helping to lead it.

The Holy Rosary gradually took form in the second millennium of Christianity.  It has nourished countless saints and has been encouraged by the Church’s teaching authority.  While we consider it a Marian prayer, it is really focused on Christ and should be understood as a summary of the Gospels.  I can’t do justice to the Rosary’s development in a homily, but a few highlights stand out.  The practice of keeping count of prayers, which also has a place in Eastern religions, can be seen in the very disciplined life of desert monasticism in the 2nd-4th centuries, where little rocks or sticks would be used to keep track of one’s completed prayers throughout the day.  In the 6th century and beyond, as Western monasticism in the style of St. Benedict grew, monks would pray all 150 psalms from the Bible over the course of a week.  But some monks had to be involved in the realities of manual labor to keep a monastery running, chores, building, farming, livestock, harvest, and repairs.  Monks who couldn’t be in the church praying with the other monks would replace a psalm by praying an Our Father.  The monks doing labor, and eventually lay faithful too, wanted to participate in the prayer of monks at the church, and so this practice of replacing the psalms with other prayers came to develop more and more.  In the 12th century and beyond an incarnational spirituality was on the rise, with greater meditation on the wonder of God’s taking on human flesh.  Devotions to Jesus (God incarnate) and Mary (who gave God His flesh) were increasing, as an expression of this incarnational focus.  This is the same time that sees the development of one familiar example of incarnational spirituality: the invention of Nativity Scene by St. Francis of Assisi.  And at this same time, St. Dominic enters the history.  The traditional customary story is that Mary appeared to St. Dominic and gave him the Rosary, asking him to use it and to promote it.  We can’t certify that story, but we do know that St. Dominic preached about the use of the Rosary, and it continued to develop and to take shape as we know it today.  The Rosary is both vocal prayer (meaning, the repeated scripted prayers) and mental prayer (meaning, meditation on the mysteries).  You aren’t really praying the Rosary if you aren’t contemplating the mysteries.

St. Dominic used the Rosary as a spiritual weapon against one of the most distorting and pernicious heresies of all time, called the Albigensian heresy.  That heresy rejected the notion that God could have become human because it viewed humanity as evil, as a corrupted thing of this world, the domain of an evil god who controls the world and this life.  At that time, the world was latching onto the heretical notion that material things and flesh are only evil, that we are only spiritual beings trapped in a body, and our real salvation is escaping this body, discarding it and being free of it.  Meanwhile, the Church was holding onto the goodness of creation, made in God’s image and likeness – fallen and marked by sin, yes – but destined for resurrection in a glorified flesh and made for eternal union with God in Heaven.  No wonder an incarnational spirituality was on the rise as a response to such a heresy on the rise.

Heresies that hold distorted notions of the material world and the dignity of human flesh are the final point I want to make in my promotion of the Rosary today.  We sometimes uncritically think about history and we think that we live in such a developed time, and the ancient and medieval peoples were kind of quaint little figures with their bands of heretics running about and misleading peasant souls; so uninformed were they back then, not like us.  That is a grave mistake for us to think.  The Albigensian heresy, that the Rosary was such an effective weapon against, was itself a reworked version of an earlier heresy that took its own stab at denouncing the material world as ruled by an evil god and that claimed that matter and flesh are evil.  That same root heresy hasn’t gone away, even if individual proponents of it (like the Albigensians) have been eradicated.  Viewing human dignity, human flesh, and the material world as not worthy of God, as evil things that God would not associate with, as depraved and therefore only worth tossing away is a heresy that still exists.  This should sound suspiciously familiar to our ears.  Yes, the same heresy exists in our time, just taking on a different form, but promoting the same pernicious and distorted lie that leads people down a path of impoverished living, lack of authentic human fulfillment, and ultimately sin that runs the risk of eternal damnation.

In short, our time too suffers under movements and ideas that have a very low view of human dignity.  Moderns might not call human flesh “evil” or claim that it is the domain of an evil god.  That all sounds far too religious and antiquated.  We’ve gotten rid of all that.  Moderns are more sophisticated than all that.  The truth is, moderns just do the same things under a different guise.  In place of calling flesh “evil”, the modern version of the heresy views it as “meaningless”.  It does not see human flesh as having its innate dignity created by God and thereby being a privileged expression of spiritual reality.  But the authentic faith holds that the soul is not just something trapped in an evil body with the only solution being escape and leaving the body behind.  Rather, the human soul properly dwells united to human flesh, whereby the body expresses the spiritual reality of the soul.  For moderns who often uncritically adopt the same reworked heresy in the various ideologies of our time, human flesh does not have its own innate dignity and meaning.  It is rather, meaningless and therefore it is subject to whatever an individual possessing it may wish to do with it and to it.  Sure, we don’t have odd sounding words like Albigensians, but our version of the heresy goes by lingo that sounds so reasonable, words like “choice” (as in: My body, my choice).  Our version of the heresy goes by words like “trans” and “non-binary”, meaning that there is no stable meaning to the body.  It’s whatever the person wants it to be.  Or our version of the heresy, focuses on only one aspect of flesh, like the meaning of sexual love.  It makes that meaningless in and of itself, by promoting a self-fulfillment in whatever sexual expression the individual desires.  Alleged sexual “freedom” in promiscuity, in forms of entertainment and media, and in an ever-expanding LGBTQ trajectory is this heresy’s “gospel”.  “Love is love”, after all, right?  The lie of this heresy is that there is no defined meaning or purpose for sexual love.  It’s up to the individual and it’s all equal and of equal value for society.  In other words, this heresy would say there is nothing uniquely meaningful about God’s design of the complementarity of the sexes, about heterosexual love, nor its contribution to the stability and good of society.  That’s heresy.  It needs an authentic response from us who are believers.  In needs a response in our words, but also in our actions, the way we live in the flesh.  We need a weapon to carry with us into the battle where we in our time, like St. Dominic in his, are supposed to be witnesses to the truth, to the goodness of God, and to His love that calls us – body and soul – into resurrected life.  The Rosary is our weapon too.  And we need to use it.  Pray it daily.  Teach it to your children.  Do it as a family.  If you have 20 minutes in the car then you have time for a Rosary.  That could be daily since we all spend so much time in the car, right?  But pray it in more serene settings too.  Come early to pray it in public before Mass.  Praying it in families or in groups in the church carries an indulgence with it.  We celebrate in faith the Resurrection of Jesus in the flesh and the hope that gives us to have a restored body united to our soul in Heaven.  May the intercession of Mary and our devotion to the Rosary help us to hold the true faith: namely, that God has chosen to grant us contact with his divinity precisely through His incarnate bodily reality, thus making the physicality of our world not evil or meaningless, but a sacramental reality that helps us touch the divine even here and now in our daily living.