Rosaries

Several innovative Protestant leaders have, over the years, tried to persuade their flocks to adapt the Catholic rosary for their own use, sometimes changing a few prayers, subtracting a few and adding others. The rosary was developed before the protestant Reformation, so it is part of the history of Protestants as well as Catholics. How did Protestant Christianity fall away from the use of the rosary? The rosary got a black mark from reformers in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church decide that people could earn an “indulgence” by saying it. Indulgences were papal dispensations from the length of time a soul must spend in purgatory to atone for sins committed during life. Indulgences were a primary cause of the Protestant Reformation, near the top of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses that he nailed to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517. After Luther broke with the Catholic Church, the rosary remained linked to the practice of indulgences in the minds of the people who eventually became Protestants.
Praying the rosary is no longer a get-out-of-purgatory-free card. And speeding through the rosary to get the indulgences is not conductive to the spirit of contemplative prayer. Protestants may be uncomfortable using the Catholic rosary. For many, their faith tradition does not include praying to the Virgin Mary or to the saints and they may prefer to directly address Jesus and God. However, John Paul II, in his 2002 apostolic letter The Rosary of the Virgin Mary, welcomed all Christians to the practice of the rosary, saying that its prayers to the Virgin Mary should be an invitation to remember the son by honoring his mother.
The Anglican Rosary was developed in the 1980s as aid for Protestants seeking a contemplative prayer. It is a hybrid of the Catholic rosary and the Orthodox Christian prayer rope. Think of Anglican rosary as the Catholic rosary’s younger sibling. For one thing, there is a family resemblance. Both consist of a circle of beads with a short line of beads extending from the bottom. Both end with a cross. But Catholic rosary has fifty-nine beads, the Anglican rosary consists of thirty-three beads. The Catholic rosary has five decades of ten beads each, while the Anglican rosary has four weeks of seven beads each. Both have beads separating these groups from each other. The Catholic rosary almost always has a crucifix – a cross bearing the image of the crucified Christ – while the Anglican rosary usually has a bare cross. There is also usually a small medal of the Virgin Mary or Jesus on the Catholic rosary, linking the circle of the decades to the short string of beads.

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