History of the Catholic Rosary
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, the newer Christian rosaries are largely based on the Catholic rosary, both in form and function. There is also a long and rich tradition of prayer and contemplation associated with the Catholic rosary that other Christian rosaries, because they are new, have not had time to accrue. Protestants can learn much from the Catholics when it comes to praying on rosaries.
There is a beautiful story surrounding the origin of the Catholic rosary. In the thirteenth century, a thirty-three-year-old priest named Dominic was working to win converts in the heart of southern France. Alas, he was having little success. One day, he was complaining of this to the Virgin Mary in a prayer. Suddenly, the Virgin appeared before him. “Wonder not that you have obtained so little fruit by your labors,” she told the started future saint. “You have spent them on barren soil, not yet watered with the dew of divine grace. 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 composed of one hundred and fifty Angelic Salutations and fifteen Our Fathers, and you will obtain an abundant harvest.” And she handed the astonished Dominic a rosary.
Scholars believe the Catholic rosary was developed during the Middle Ages as a way for laypeople to engage in extended prayer. At the time, priests, nuns, and monks performed the Divine, or Daily, Office, which are set of prayers based on the Psalms, sung at certain times of the day and night. The first solution was to have faithful recite all 150 Psalms in a single sitting. But that was too much for the average layperson to remember, so the Psalms were divided into three parts, allowing the devout to recite only fifty psalms in on session.
But even this was not simple enough. How many of use today could remember fifty psalms? So it became the practice to say the “Our Father” – the Lord’s Prayer – 150 times. If time of circumstances made it necessary, this could be reduced to on hundred or fifty Our Fathers. Keeping track of how many psalms or other prayers were said required a counting device, so a set of beads – with fifty, one hundred, or 150 beads – was settled on, and the beads became known as Pater Nosters, Latin for “Our Fathers.” In London, an entire street of artisans crafted these beads on what came to be known as Pater Noster Row and the rosary became known as “the poor man’s psalter.”
The “Hail Mary” prayer assigned to most of the beads on the Catholic rosaries in use today appeared in the fifteenth century. Again, the reasons that are not entirely clear – perhaps because it was shorter, perhaps because its plea is simple and direct – it became very popular and replaced the Our Fathers on most of the beads.
Also by the fifteenth century, the practice of praying the rosary while meditating on events in Christ’s life became a common and codified practice. It was developed by Dominic of Prussia, a Carthusian monk, who highlighted fifty events in Christ’s life for contemplation during the recitation of the rosary. Dominic said the idea came to him in a vision in which he saw a tree with fifty leaves, each one representing a different episode in the gospel. Dominic’s innovation was to assign Hail Mary prayer and bead its own episode. But remembering fifty of these, too, proved too difficult for laypeople, and by the sixteenth century, the number of episodes was shortened to fifteen. This five-hundred-year-old practice of contemplating these mysteries while praying the Catholic rosary survives to this day.