It is said that the Rosary is the greatest prayer in the Church after the Holy Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours. The Mass of course being the greatest, because it is in the Mass we receive the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord, the Most High Jesus Christ, in the Most Holy Eucharist; in the Mass we receive the Word spoken and the Word made flesh. The Rosary is a powerful way to open our souls even more to the great graces we receive in the Mass. In the Rosary we pray the Our Father, which the Lord Himself gave to us, and the Hail Mary, which is based on the Angelic Salutation spoken to Mary by the archangel Gabriel, to which our Lady consented to be the Mother of our Savior and Redeemer; in her so doing, Salvation entered the world.

What about vain repetition? Our Lord did teach that vain repetition is fruitless, as we read in the Gospels. "And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words." (Mt 6:7) But there is a difference between repetition and vain repetition. When meant sincerely, the words "I love you" are beautiful, and who tires of hearing it? But if said in vain as if out of obligation, why bother? Certainly words said with a mechanical emptiness become vain, and very much so in prayer. Even a prayer said one time alone can be in vain if it isn't prayed from the heart and directed to Almighty God. When we as Christians pray, even when we pray to Mary or one of the other saints, our prayer is always directed ultimately to God, because we recognize and give thanks to Him Who alone can answer our prayers. When we pray to Mary, it is to implore her to intercede in prayer for us to the Lord, as is the case when we pray to the angels and other saints of God. Whatever grace and blessings we receive as a result of imploring the prayers of the saints, they ultimately comes from God. Staying with the question of vain repetition, we can look at the book of Psalms, a book cherished by Catholics and Protestants both as a book of prayer. In Psalm 136 is an example of repetition in prayer, in the phrase, "for his steadfast love endures forever", which is repeated 25 times. This phrase is repeated after recalling different things the Lord has done for His people. This thanksgiving for the many mighty deeds of the Lord is a prayer, and a prayer which involves repetition of a certain phrase. It can be seen then, that it wasn't only the Gentiles who used repetition in prayer. Therefore it isn't merely repetition that is fruitless, but vain repetition. A prayer of contemplation and meditation In the Rosary we meditate on the different events of the life of Jesus and His mother. From the Annunciation, to the wedding feast at Cana, to the Passion and death on the cross, Mary's life is closely interwoven with the life of her Son. A sincere meditation on the events of the life of the mother of Jesus cannot fail to bring us closer to her Son, since everything about her life points to and magnifies Him. Praying the Rosary helps to knit our hearts together with the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Mary is the blessed woman who conceived the Word in her womb and bore our Savior into the world. As we recall the many mighty deeds of our Lord in the Rosary, we pray the Hail Mary, in which we repeat again and again the words, "blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus!" It is perhaps helpful to remember the words Mary said to the servants at the Wedding feast at Cana when she said, "Do whatever He tells you." (see John 2:5) Mary reminds us to be doers of the word and not just hearers. This is what devotion to Mary is all about, because she always points the way to Jesus, and so it is fitting that one of the titles given to her in the Catholic Church is "Mother of good council". Prayers of the Rosary Two of the prayers I want to focus on here are the Our Father and the Angelic Salutation (Hail Mary). Insofar as the Angelic Salutation and the Our Father come to us from the times of the apostles, spoken by Gabriel to Mary, and by our Lord Himself to His disciples, they are the very heart of the Holy Rosary. Because these prayers quite literally come from heaven, it's understandable that these two prayers should become such a significant way in which the Rosary developed over time. The Lord's Prayer ...your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: ..." (Matthew 6:8,9) This is the prayer given to us by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Himself, Who taught us to call God Father. He taught us also that our Heavenly Father knows all our needs and wants before we ask Him. Confident in this knowledge, we can offer up our prayer to the Heavenly Father with open hearts, trusting in His fatherly love for us, His children. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 2761, the Lord's Prayer is referred to as the summary of the whole gospel. And when speaking of the psalms, St. Augustine talked of how they flow together in the petitions of the Our Father and how he thought that everything in them can be found to be contained in the Lord's Prayer. In the Rosary we pray this prayer at the beginning of each decade of the Rosary, in which we meditate on the events of our Lord's Life.

The Hail Mary "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee." Whereas the Lord's prayer is universally known among all Christians, the Hail Mary is one of the most misunderstood prayers among those who are not Catholic. In fact, Mary's role in our Faith is misunderstood even by some Catholics. Because of this misunderstanding, some explanation is is helpful. The Hail Mary consists of two parts, that of praise and petition. The first part of this prayer, comes from Sacred Scripture, and is based on the Angelic Salutation with which the archangel Gabriel greeted Mary when he said, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!" (Luke 1:28). He announced to her than she would be the Mother of Jesus, the Son of the Most High, and that His reign would last forever.

Since the words spoken to Mary were by the angel of the Lord, we know they come straight from Heaven. And since the angel of the Lord as messenger of the Most High, speaks only what he is sent by Him to speak, we can know with certainty that it is the same as the Lord Himself speaking. It is by the assurance of such Divine Authority that we too greet, with confidence, our Blessed Mother in prayer saying, "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. The next part of the prayer comes from Elizabeth's greeting to Mary as Elizabeth was inspired by the Holy Spirit when she said: "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb." (Luke 1:42). The only thing that has been added to these two verses are the names "Jesus" and "Mary", but this addition is in no way contrary to Scripture since it only names who we know is being spoken to and of already; that it is Mary, the angel of the Lord called "full of grace", and Jesus Whom Elizabeth called the "fruit" of Mary's womb. "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen" Although this second part of the Hail Mary isn't taken directly from Scripture, it is biblical in what it says. Since Mary is the mother of Jesus Christ, the Word Incarnate (In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. -- John 1:1), she is rightly called the Mother of God. In Luke 1:43 we hear Elizabeth say to Mary: "And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" Her words can't be so easily dismissed since she spoke while inspired by the Holy Spirit. The Blessed Virgin Mary is Theotokos In the year 431 at the council of Ephesus, Mary was proclaimed Theotokos ('God-bearer', or 'Mother of God' as it translates in Latin). Some critics of this doctrine have pointed out this later dating of the proclamation as evidence that the doctrine was a later invention and therefore false. Yet, long before the council of Ephesus, it was a part of the traditional piety of the faithful to believe in Mary as the Mother of God. The reason for the decree at the Council of Ephesus was to correct the heresy which denied the divinity of Christ. The heresy revolves around an eastern Bishop named Nestorius who objected to Mary being called the mother of God. He said that she ought to be called "Christotokos" (Christ-bearer)instead of "Theotokos" (God-bearer). The Church quickly condemned that teaching and was addressed at the Council of Ephesus. Far from being mere folk superstition as some might accuse, this belief was shown to have legitimate theological grounds when at the council of Ephesus, long collections of texts from all the classic theologians of past days were read, which showed the orthodoxy of the term Theotokos. An official proclamation of this term as dogma was seen as necessary in order to make a stand against the heresies of the 4th and 5th centuries such as the one popularized by Nestorius, which threatened to separate Christ’s human nature from his divine personhood and create the notion of two separate and distinct persons or two Christ's. Although this is believed not to have been Nestorius' intention, it was the logical outcome of his teaching. Nestorius did insist on the unity of the Person, speaking of the "two Natures which are adored in the one Person of the Only-begotten by a perfect and unconfused conjunction". However he still denounced those who use the word Theotokos in reference to Mary, though he agreed with the use of it when properly understood. The problem is that even with this supposed proper understanding, he made the error that the Blessed Virgin is not the mother of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity; rather that she is the mother of the human nature of the Person but not of the Divine Person Himself, based in the notion that, "No one can bring forth a son older than herself." This is an error because a mother doesn't give birth merely to a "nature" but to a person, and to deny this has paved the way not only to heresies about who Jesus is, but also to the belief that such things as abortion are okay because what is in the mother's womb isn't really a person, as some say! But even at the very moment of conception there is a living person in the mother's womb, and in the case of the Blessed Virgin, a Divine Person. One of the reasons some people object to Mary being called the Mother of God is that they think this would mean she is a goddess, and yet no right believing Catholic who believes Mary is the Mother of God believes her to be a goddess. Another objection is that for her to be the Mother of God suggests that she is herself older than God. Mary being the Mother of God doesn't mean she is older than God or the source of His Divinity, but rather that at a certain point in human history, the Second Person of the Trinity chose to be conceived in Mary's womb, thereby making her His mother. At no point did He cease to be God, the Word, but as Scripture tells us, He emptied Himself of His glory (not of His innate Divinity) and chose to be born into the humble state of frail human flesh. It is in Mary's womb that our Lord, the Word, became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). In Luke 1:43, when Elizabeth refers to the fruit of Mary's womb as "Lord", we see scriptural basis for Mary being the mother of God. Among the Jews the name of God was not spoken, so the word "Lord" was used to preserve respect. The word "Lord" that we see in English translations of the New Testament, is preserved in the Greek as "kyrios", although the language that Elizabeth spoke was Aramaic. When translating Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek, as in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), used by Greek-speaking Jews, the word substituted for God's name was Kyrios, meaning "Lord". This was used in instead of I AM, the Divine Name of God, which Christ used for Himself in John 8:58. When the Jews asked Him how He could have seen Abraham, Jesus replies, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am." The "I am" in this statement is a reference to God's Name and the Jews understood exactly who he was claiming to be.

Elizabeth calls the fruit of Mary's womb "Lord", with all the meaning which the Jews understood it, and which the Catholic Church continues to understand of the Word Incarnate in Mary's womb. As pointed out from John 1:1, the Word is God; therefore the Person Mary conceived in her womb, was God. It wasn't God the Father that she conceived, but God the Son who is the Word, and that is what the Catholic Church means in teaching that Mary the Mother of God; namely that the Person she conceived in her womb was a Divine Person, the Person of God the Son. The doctrine proclaimed at the Council of Ephesus that Mary is the Mother of God, was meant to protect this apostolic teaching of the divinity of Jesus Christ. .

The Joyful Mysteries	Na Rúndiamhra Sólásacha
The Luminous Mysteries	Na Rúndiamhra Solasmhara
The Sorrowful Mysteries	Na Rúndiamhra Dólásacha
The Glorious Mysteries	Na Rúndiamhra Glórmhara