Rosary Mystery Meditations: A Day-By-Day Prayer Companion

By Lorraine Fleury

Rosary Mystery Meditations is a companion for praying the Rosary every day for three months. It follows the traditional format for praying the Rosary: the Joyful Mysteries on Monday and Saturday, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday and Friday, and the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday and Sunday. It provides scriptures, mini-meditations and prayers for each day of the week. These meditations are “bite-sized,” and easy to digest mentally while praying the Rosary. The best way to use Rosary Mystery Meditations is to actually read along with it while praying: beads in one hand and this book in the other. While praying the Rosary has often been considered to be too stuffy and old-fashioned for our modern times, its relevance is actually more critical than ever before. The 21st century is beset with problems that demand solutions, and solutions often require deep prayer and the power of God. As Sister Lucia dos Santos (one of the “Fatima” seers) said, “There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664242654

Lorraine Fleury

An adult convert, Lorraine Fleury was not raised to be Catholic, much less to pray the Rosary daily. But, when at the age of 50 she was confronted with a frightening spiritual sickness created from the long-time practice of her New Age meditations, she found her miracle healing in the time-honored tradition of praying the Rosary. Later, using insights from her BA in Psychology, she was able to put together this companion book of meditations for anyone who wants to learn to pray the Rosary with more depth and insight.

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Copyright © 2021 Lorraine Fleury.

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Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised

edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine,

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ISBN: 978-1-6642-4266-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-4267-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-4265-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021916333

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/11/2021

Contents

Chapter 1 Why I Wrote This Book

Chapter 2 What is the Rosary?

Chapter 3 Why Pray the Rosary?

Chapter 4 Why Meditate on the Rosary’s Mysteries Using This Book?

Chapter 5 How I Came to Pray the Rosary

Chapter 6 How to Pray the Rosary

Chapter 7 Preparing to Pray the Rosary

Chapter 8 How to Use This Book

Chapter 9 Prayers

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Week Four

Week Five

Week Six

Week Seven

Week Eight

Week Nine

Week Ten

Week Eleven

Week Twelve

Week Thirteen

Addendum

Bibliography

Endnotes

About the Author

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One

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

P art of praying the Rosary involves meditating on the events of Jesus’s and Mary’s lives, known as mysteries. Without this meditation, the Rosary prayers can become highly repetitive. As I was learning how to pray the Rosary, I tried to focus on the mysteries, but I had trouble accomplishing it without any help. Then I started reading books about the mysteries to have something to meditate upon while praying, but the meditations were too long to remember while praying in a meditative state. Or, if I could find something that wasn’t very long, as I kept using the same meditation, it became repetitive also. What I needed was a prayer companion that would have many different reflections and prayers that were compact and able to be digested easily in a meditative state, and that changed day-by-day. I couldn’t find anything like that out in the universe of available books, so in 2013 I started developing a prayer companion for my self.

Praying with the companion book that I created assisted me to pray my Rosary with focus and reflection. It helped me to minimize my tendency to get distracted with thoughts that were totally unrelated. It oriented me toward doing the best I could with the day ahead. And it kept the spiritual aspect of my life in better focus and my center of attention more on Jesus during the day.

Then I thought that others might benefit from it, too, as a prayer companion for their Rosaries. Looking back now, I believe that God was holding my hand throughout this process, guiding me to write something to facilitate praying the Rosary with more devotion and fervor because He wants it to be prayed much more than it is currently prayed, to help people develop in their faith lives, and to create a more peaceful planet.

Especially in these days of the COVID-19 virus pandemic, I believe that the Rosary needs to be prayed often and prayed as fervently as possible. We are going through very difficult times now, and I believe that God wants us to avail ourselves of this valuable tool because it will assist us in sticking closer to Him as we walk through it all.

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Two

WHAT IS THE ROSARY?

T he Rosary prayer is not just one prayer; it is a group of prayers that are recited using a set of rosary beads. It developed as a Catholic prayer, but it can be prayed by anyone of any faith – Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise spiritually affiliated. It is scriptural and Christ-centered. It was developed in stages over hundreds of years, and its origins are partly human and partly divine. It is a very fast way to connect with Jesus and His mother, Mary, and so it is an exceedingly powerful force for the good. It can include intercessory prayers for anyone you would like to pray for, as well as various prayers you would like to include or exclude. It has been called a Bible on a String, because it contains meditation on the events of Jesus’s and Mary’s lives and helps us to learn more about the Christian faith. It was St. John Paul II’s favorite prayer. Pope Leo XIII wrote eleven encyclicals on it. Venerable Father Patrick Peyton drew huge crowds in the 1950s and 1960s for his Rosary Crusade gatherings. It was he who coined the phrase, The family who prays together stays together. The Rosary is a favorite prayer of most all the saints. It is also a healing prayer, that has worked countless personal miracles in the lives of those who pray it, as well as some famous miracles in the larger sphere of the world. In these days of the COVID-19 virus and its disruption of our everyday existence, it is a mighty prayer to aid in reducing anxiety and stress and to increase one’s confident faith in God’s providence in this life as well as in the after life.

HISTORY OF THE ROSARY

From the earliest of Christian times, monks used to pray the 150 psalms in the Bible by reading them and chanting them as a way to deepen their spirituality. They would use rocks or beads to count the psalms. Some laypeople (parishioners) became desirous of having this deeper kind of spiritual life also, but they were mostly illiterate and could not read the psalms. So, they then started reciting the Our Father prayer 150 times to correspond with each of the psalms. Then the Hail Mary prayer started to be developed over time, and the laypeople used the Hail Mary instead, in decades of ten beads, and meditated on a mystery of Christ’s (or Mary’s) life during the recitation of the decade. They prayed the Our Father on a bead separating each decade to mark each one. The mysteries were divided up into fifteen mysteries with ten beads apiece, namely five for the joyful, five for the sorrowful and five for the glorious mysteries. In 2002, St. John Paul II introduced five more mysteries that he named the luminous mysteries, or the mysteries of light, concerning Jesus’s life between His finding in the temple (at age twelve) and His agony in the garden. Therefore, the luminous mysteries encompass His public ministry years. The result was two hundred beads that are customarily prayed with fifty each day. Monday and Saturday are devoted to the joyful mysteries, Tuesday and Friday are devoted to the sorrowful mysteries, Wednesday and Sunday are devoted to the glorious mysteries, and Thursday is devoted to the luminous mysteries.

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Three

WHY PRAY THE ROSARY?

T here is a famous and church-approved set of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1917 in a town of Portugal called Fatima. At Fatima, she appeared to three children while they were praying the Rosary. The children were Francisco Marto, Jacinta Marto, and Lucia dos Santos. There, at Fatima, as the Blessed Virgin appeared to the children on October 13, 1917, she made the sun dance in the sky to a huge group of onlookers. This is now known as the Miracle of the Sun. During the apparitions at Fatima that year, she strongly encouraged everyone in the world to pray the Rosary for peace on earth. Francisco and Jacinta both died very young during the Spanish flu pandemic that ravaged Europe in the late 1910s. But little Lucia grew up to become a Carmelite nun. When she was older, she said the follo wing:

The Most Holy Virgin, in these last times in which we live, has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the rosary to such an extent that there is no problem, no matter how difficult it is, whether temporal or above all spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us, of our families that cannot be solved by the rosary. There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the holy rosary.¹

No problem that cannot be resolved by the prayer of the Rosary? This, coming from Lucia dos Santos, who had such an intimate communion with the Blessed Virgin! Just think of all the problems in our world that could be resolved through praying this if we but tried it! Just think of all the problems that have beset you because of the COVID crisis. Have you lost your job? Your business? Your hope in the future of humanity? The Rosary will aid you with all these things. And as the Blessed Virgin Mary said, we could even attain world peace if enough of us prayed the Rosary.

There were other church-approved apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the last 150 years in which she strongly encouraged the prayer of the Rosary for peace, as well as to keep the modern culture from descending into degeneration:

• In Lourdes, France (1858)

• In Banneux, Belgium (1933)

• In Akita, Japan (1973)

• In San Nicolas, Argentina (in the 1980s)

Here are the fifteen promises of the Rosary, as given to St. Dominic and/or Blessed Alan de la Roche by Mary, Our Lady:

1. Whoever shall faithfully serve me by the recitation of the Rosary shall receive signal graces.

2. I promise my special protection and the greatest graces to all those who shall recite the Rosary.

3. The Rosary shall be a powerful armor against hell, it will destroy vice, decrease sin and defeat heresies.

4. The Rosary will cause virtue and good works to flourish; it will obtain for souls the abundant mercy of God; it will withdraw the hearts of men from the love of the world and its vanities, and will lift them to the desire for eternal things. Oh, that souls would sanctify themselves by this means.

5. The soul which recommends itself to me by the recitation of the Rosary shall not perish.

6. Whoever shall recite the Rosary devoutly, applying himself to the consideration of its sacred mysteries, shall never be conquered by misfortune. God will not chastise him in His justice, he shall not perish by an unprovided death; if he be just he shall remain in the grace of God, and become worthy of eternal life.

7. Whoever shall have a true devotion for the Rosary shall not die without the Sacraments of the Church.

8. Those who are faithful to recite the Rosary shall have during their life and at their death the light of God and the plentitude of his graces; at the moment of death they shall participate in the merits of the saints in paradise.

9. I shall deliver from Purgatory those who have been devoted to the Rosary.

10. The faithful children of the Rosary shall merit a high degree of glory in heaven.

11. You shall obtain all you ask of me by the recitation of the Rosary.

12. All those who propagate the Holy Rosary shall be aided by me in their necessities.

13. I have obtained from my Divine Son that all the advocates of the Rosary shall have for intercessors the entire celestial court during their life and at the hour of death.

14. All who recite the Rosary are my sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters of my only Son, Jesus Christ.

15. Devotion of my Rosary is a great sign of predestination.²

The Rosary has been recognized for centuries for its power to change the destinies of nations and individuals. Here are a few of the miraculous victories that were won by praying the Rosary:

• The Battle of Lepanto: In the 16th century, radical Islamic Turks sent a huge fleet of ships to overthrow all the port cities of the Mediterranean. Pope Pius V sent a much smaller armada to meet them, and called for all Christendom to pray the Rosary for victory. The Christian forces, led by Don Juan, won the battle on October 7, 1571, and Pope Pius V attributed the success to the prayer of the Rosary.

• Routing Communism in Brazil: In 1964, the Brazilian President Joao Goulart was governing the country. He was communist-leaning and was trying to convert Brazil into a communist country, but then an enormous rally of six hundred thousand people took place, all marching through the streets of Sao Paolo praying the Rosary to stop the communist plot. Within two weeks, Goulart was so rattled by the events that he left the country, which never became communist.

• Chilean Miners: In 2010, the world became fascinated with a story from Chile. Thirty-three miners had become trapped 2300 feet down in a mine. After their location was found seventeen days later, there still remained the task of somehow getting them out of the shaft. Pope Benedict XVI asked the world to pray the Rosary for the safety of the miners and sent thirty-three blessed Rosary beads down the shaft for the miners to pray with. Miraculously, all thirty-three miners were rescued sixty-nine days after their being trapped, alive. The date of their rescue was October 13, 2010 — the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima.

• Boko Haram: In Nigeria in 2014, the radical Muslim group Boko Haram kidnapped more than two hundred girls from a school there. The whole world was grieved over it. Then later that year, in December 2014, a Nigerian Catholic bishop was praying the Rosary while Jesus appeared to him. Jesus held a sword and extended it to the bishop. When he went to take it from Jesus, it transformed into a Rosary. Then Jesus told him three times, Boko Haram is gone! Boko Haram is gone! Boko Haram is gone! Afterward, the bishop promoted the prayer of the Rosary heavily in his diocese, because he realized that the meaning of the vision was that with the Rosary, the people would be able to drive out Boko Haram. Then, between 2016 and 2017, over one hundred of the girls were returned from their captivity, and seven hundred members of Boko Haram surrendered themselves to the Nigerian authorities.

Some other examples of how the Rosary has worked miracles in the lives of ordinary people:

• Bartolo Longo: Blessed Bartolo Longo lived in the nineteenth century in Naples, Italy. Raised Catholic, he went to a college that was embroiled in a nationalist movement that was extremely critical of the Catholic Church. He ended up leaving the church and dabbling in the occult, by attending seances and getting involved with cults. He even went so far as to become a satanic priest! Then he started to suffer nightmares, anxieties, hallucinations and depression that were so distressing that he contemplated suicide. Out of desperation, he went to see a Catholic priest who told him of the power of the Rosary for blessings and recommended it to him. He started to pray the Rosary. Not long after that, he renounced Satan and anything to do with the occult, and became a Third-Order Dominican. He went to Pompeii, helped the people there and built a basilica dedicated to the Rosary. He opened schools and orphanages, and everywhere he went he spread devotion to the Rosary. He became so holy that he was beatified (declared blessed in the eyes of the Catholic Church) in 1980.

• Ted Bundy: In 1978, while Ted Bundy was on his killing spree in Florida, he approached a sorority house, broke in, and killed several young women. However, there was one young woman who had fallen asleep while praying the Rosary. (She had promised her mother that she would pray the Rosary every night before she went off to college.) When Bundy opened the door to her room, he ran away in fright, due to some mysterious force that somehow prevented him from killing her.

• Rwandan Genocide: Immaculee Ilibagiza is a woman who was born and raised in Rwanda, Africa, which is comprised of members of the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. In 1994 the Hutu president was assassinated, sparking a three-month period of massacres of Tutsi tribe members; Immaculee is a member of the Tutsi tribe. She found herself in a small bathroom for three months huddled with seven other women, trying to stay as quiet as possible to escape the notice of the Hutu murderers who were going from house to house killing Tutsis. She used that frightful time to pray the Rosary in order to drive away the evil that the murderers brought with them, and to calm her anger inside. Not only did all the women survive their ordeal, but Immaculee was able to forgive the unthinkable. She forgave even the murderers of her family from her heart, because of having prayed the Rosary.

• Brought Back to God: One woman recounted how although she was raised Catholic and had a deep devotion to the Rosary and to Mary in her youth, she fell out of Catholicism in her college years and stopped praying the Rosary. She tried going to Protestant Churches but was never able to get a feeling of being close to God again. She wound up getting into acute emotional distress and feeling very depressed over some traumas in her past, including having been raped. Even as she thought she might be losing her mind, she came back to the Rosary, praying it in her despair. The Rosary ended up being the catalyst to her finding a place where God could touch her soul again. Eventually, all the sorrow was silenced, and she started experiencing the true joy and love that is of the Holy Spirit once again.

• Men’s Retreat: A Catholic man who felt that the Rosary was for old ladies and funerals ended up having a strong conversion as a result of the Rosary. Married, with small children, he found himself at the lowest point of his life because he and his wife were having marital problems so severe that divorce was a distinct possibility. He felt hopeless and like a failure in his life. While going to a men’s retreat to try to find spiritual renewal, he found himself with a group of men who would pray the Rosary every morning before sunup. While praying the Rosary, something seemed to melt his heart and he had a spiritual awakening – a renewed connection with God – and felt himself being reborn. This put him on the road of praying the Rosary regularly, and his marriage was healed and became more joyous than ever.

• Found Husband: Another woman described how although she had grown up Catholic and was raised by her parents to pray the Rosary every night, she never actually understood the reason for it until she had her heart broken in her late teens. At that point, she began praying the Rosary often, for comfort. She began praying for the Blessed Mother’s intercession in her life, including praying for her future husband whom she met a little bit later. She is now married with a child and faithfully prays the Rosary every day — because without it, she says that her days would be filled with spiritual emptiness — but with it, she receives the peace and joy that allow her to get through her day.

Now with the pandemic of the COVID-19 virus that we are experiencing all across the planet, praying the Rosary is a way to deflect the anxiety and angst many are feeling about their jobs, paying their bills, educating their children, the state of the world economy and the state of their IRAs and 401(k)s – not to mention a way of helping to survive the disease through prayer. Praying the Rosary may sound formal, stuffy and old-school, but it is a treasure of comfort and solace just waiting to be tapped.

Some other reasons to pray the Rosary:

• To save our world from degeneration, disaster and war.

• To give peace and calm to one’s day.

• To foster a greater closeness to God, especially when one meditates on the mysteries.

• To add positive spiritual energy to planet earth and all the people living on it, in a tangible way — to uplift it.

• To give moral freedom to the person praying, which often comes spontaneously later outside of prayer.

Jesus Himself described the importance of devotional prayer, and especially the intense prayer of asking over and over, as follows:

• Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you (Matthew 7:7).

• Then he told them a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary. He said, ‘There was a judge in a certain town who neither feared God nor respected any human being. And a widow in that town used to come to him and say, Render a just decision for me against my adversary. For a long time the judge was unwilling, but eventually he thought, While it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being, because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and