The History of the Rosary

In Light of the Scriptures and in Harmony with the Liturgy

Perhaps most of us think today about the Rosary in the context of the recent apparitions of our Lady—the statue of Mary at the grotto of Lourdes with a rosary in her hands; the shepherds of Fatima being taught to pray the Rosary daily for the conversion of sinners.

However, the roots of the Rosary go deep in time. The Rosary grew during the Middle Ages in the soil of a strong liturgical and biblical devotion to Jesus and Mary. More specifically, it grew out of the mode in which Christian folk knew the Bible’s mysteries before the printing press, i.e., through the daily experience of celebrating the liturgy in the monasteries around which they lived.

The relationship of the Rosary to the Bible and the liturgy is completely organic and natural. Indeed, we often fail to realize that Mary’s call to conversation through the praying of the Rosary leads us back to and prepares us for a fruitful participation in the one sacrifice of her Son on the Cross, renewed daily in the Eucharist, and by which all graces were won once and for all time. The sacrifice of Christ made present again in the mystery of the Mass is the source of salvation for all sinners, of all ages. Just as Mary stood by the Cross of Christ in life, so she cares to bind us to it now from heaven with the golden chain of her Rosary.

The Paternosters

Once upon a time… Now let us go back to ninth century Ireland. In those days, as is still true today, the 150 Psalms, which are found among the Old Testament books of the Bible, formed the core of the Divine Office—the circlet of praise and petition that the Church offers daily to the Father through Jesus Christ in the love of the Holy Spirit. The chanting of the Psalms at regular times during the day and night was a major source of inspiration—and a mandatory duty for the clergy and monks, who contemplated the lives of Jesus and Mary in the foreshadows and prefiguration of these most ancient prayers.

As often as they could, under the rhythm of farming chores and seasons, the lay people who lived near the monasteries would participate in this, the official prayer of the Church. However, since very few could read, and even fewer could own books, which were very expensive as they had to be copied by hand, only those who knew the Psalms by heart could recite them on their own, when work kept them away from the chapel.

So one day around the beginnings of the ninth century, a devout Irish monk suggested to the neighboring lay people that they might pray a series of 150 Our Fathers in place of the 150 Psalms. The seed of the Rosary was planted. In time, all over Western Europe, people who could not fully join in the praying of the liturgy came gradually to replace the 150 Psalms with 150 Hail Marys, arranged into 15 decades, each preceded by the Our Father and concluded with the Glory Be—but more about this story in a bit. The important fact to retain now is that the Rosary was introduced as a kind of simpler and shorter Divine Office, to help simple or busy people contemplate all the mysteries of Christ’s life commemorated more fully by the liturgy.

A Weapon of War

Another aspect of the Rosary’s history that we often forget is its warring character. From the outset, the Rosary was a chosen weapon of spiritual warfare, with each bead crafted for battle against the enemies of mankind and Christ’s Church.

Since the common folk was finding participation in liturgical prayer more difficult, it was imperative to build around the City of God an outer wall of strong but more accessible prayer, to defend all the Church’s children against the adversaries of virtue and glory through the contemplation of Christ’s and Mary’s lives.

Now, it should come as no surprise to see Mary’s Rosary as a weapon for spiritual war. To be sure, the Bible proclaims Mary as the Woman crowned with stars and dressed with the sun, with her seed crushing the head of the Enemy. God’s word also describes Mary as beautiful as an army arrayed in battle formation, facing victoriously all of God’s enemies.

Already in the early days of the Rosary, our Lady gave it to Saint Dominic in answer to his prayer for help in dealing with the advances of the devil and error, blinding many among his flock. Even the Popes, the successors of the Apostle Peter, have often called on Christians to pray the Rosary to overcome deadly threats. Think but of Saint Pius V and the decisive victory won at Lepanto to defend Christian Europe over the Turkish fleet; or of John Paul II urging us to pray the Rosary for the defense of life and the family against all those powers set to overturn them.

Struggle against evil is not a thing of the past. Here are but some of the most dangerous enemies the Rosary will help you confront in your daily life:

The ignorance of God’s truth, a truth that makes us free from evil.
The bondage of sin, especially of addictive behaviors that dehumanize us—substance abuse, disordered sex, etc.
The undermining of the family and the onslaught against human life.
The attacks of secularism seeking to erase God and his Church from public life.
The triumph of a dissolving materialism through self–centered consumerism.
The loss of hope and the sense of meaninglessness.

A War of Mercy

The spiritual crusade of the Rosary is in the last analysis a crusade of mercy to obtain from Mary, the “Refuge of Sinners,” pardon and conversion, repentance and healing. She openly battled against God’s enemies already at the foot of the Cross, with the good thief as her first resounding victory!

She brings us, sinners, back to that same Cross through the Rosary, to strengthen us with the food of life and to wash all our sins in the blood of her Son. With each Hail Mary, she teaches us to follow Christ’s example as it unfolds in the mysteries of his life: “do whatever he tells you!” (Jn 2:5).

“Penance! Penance! Penance!” —such is the call of the angel of Fatima, but also the essential message of all interventions of Mary in our times. Penance is conversion from sin and renunciation of evil. It is the only way out of the triple “Woe! Woe! Woe! to the inhabitants of the earth” of the angel of the Apocalypse (cf. Rev 8:13).

Although the warfare of the Rosary is essentially a spiritual warfare, there are also a few actual flesh and blood battles and victories thrown in when necessary, to the great encouragement of foot Christ. With the Rosary in our hands, let us then join in the battle, praising loud the glories of Mary and begging her to let us fight her battles against all God’s enemies, starting with our sins.

The Rosary and the Psalter

We mentioned already that the Rosary roots go deep into the Divine Office, the liturgy of praise, thanksgiving, petition, and reparation for sin that the Church celebrates ceaselessly throughout the night and day hours. When the Rosary is prayed properly, then, its heavenly fragrance brings to mind the same mysteries that the liturgy of the Church commemorates; that is, the saving deeds of our Lord Jesus Christ and his faithful companion, our Lady.

The Divine Office is a splendid setting surrounding the liturgy of the Eucharist, bringing out its radiance of grace and holiness to each moment of time. The name “Divine Office” goes back to the Latin word “officium,” which means something one does for another (ob + facere). Today, the Divine Office is often referred to as the “Liturgy of the Hours” since it is prayed at certain times or “hours” throughout the day and night. In essence it is a collection of prayers, mainly the 150 Psalms, which we Christians pray in the name of Christ, to the glory of the Trinity and for the sake of each other.

The Church Fathers and the medieval theologians had long considered the 150 Psalms (in fact, the entire Scriptures) to be veiled prophecies (Old Testament) or open statements (New Testament) about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To pray the Divine Office was to contemplate the face of Christ through the selected Bible passages chosen for each celebration.

As a result of deep meditation and skillful interpretation of the Psalms in lectio divina (the prayerful reading of the Scriptures), spiritual authors began in time to compose “Psalters of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” —series of 150 short praises in honor of Jesus, based upon interpretations of the 150 Psalms—the word “psalter” comes from the name of a musical instrument used to accompany the chanting of the Psalms.

It wasn’t long before “psalters” devoted to 150 praises of Mary were also composed. Now, when a psalter dedicated to Mary numbered 50 praises instead of 150, it was commonly called a rosarium, a smaller bouquet of roses—and from this custom comes the name “Rosary.”

The importance of these psalters rests on their ability to help people contemplate easily the life of Christ or Mary by means of small statements or thoughts inspired from the Psalms, the word of God. Because the Psalms so perfectly express the mind and heart of Jesus and Mary, throughout history all Christians have striven to recite them. But when people began replacing the praying of the Psalms with 150 Our Father or, later, with 150 Hail Marys, they spontaneously kept up the tradition of contemplating through these prayers Christ’s mysteries, to which they were familiar because of the Liturgy of the Hours.

The Beads

Unsurprisingly, folk devised means for counting the 150 Our Fathers. First, they carried around leather pouches with 150 pebbles. Soon, however, they developed ropes with 150 or 50 knots. Eventually, they began to use strings with 50 pieces of wood, or even stones.

An interesting and relatively early witness to this practice among Catholics is found in the will of the Countess Godiva of Coventry, who died around 1075. In her will she bequeaths to a monastery “the circlet of precious stones which she had threaded on a cord in order that by fingering them one after another she might count her prayers exactly.”

At that time, such devices were known as Paternosters, after the Latin words for Our Father. By 1268, this form of prayer had become so widespread that Paris boasted four guilds of paternostriers dedicated to making these counting devices. In England, the street Paternoster Row still witnesses to the presence of such guilds that were there at one time.

The Origins of the Hail Mary

When did people begin praying the Hail Mary as part of the Rosary? Not until this prayer, which we all know and take for granted, came into being. Its begetting took time, growing gradually as the centuries unfolded. It too seems to have its roots in the liturgy of the Church, specifically in the love of people for the Offertory Antiphon of the 4th Sunday of Advent, which became a common text in the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary—a sort of simplified Divine Office in honor of our Lady.

In the Little Office, the greeting of the angel, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” and the exclamation of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb!” were often paired as versicle and response. By force of repetition and love, these two lines were eventually melded together in the minds of the faithful as one prayer to make the first part of our Hail Mary, or the Angelic Salutation. Saint Peter Damian, who died in 1072, was the first to mention in writing this prayer form.

The name of Jesus and the second part, beginning “Holy Mary,” were not added until later, around the year 1483. When people began reciting the Hail Mary instead of the Our Father on their Paternoster beads, a further step was taken in the direction of our present–day Rosary.

The Merging of Devotions

So by the thirteenth century there were four different popular devotions: the praying of the 150 Our Fathers, the 150 Angelic Salutations or Hail Marys, the 150 praises or psalter of Jesus, and the 150 praises or psalter of Mary. These four prayer forms were eventually combined into the Rosary we pray today.

It is from the psalters of Mary that we get the very heart of the Rosary, the “mysteries” we contemplate with each decade—remember that these psalters, substituting the praying of the Psalms, gave meditations on the lives of Jesus and Mary found in the Psalms themselves.

For example, for the first line of psalm 109, which reads, “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool,’” Saint Anselm offered this meditation: “Hail! thou David’s daughter from whom our nature sits at the Father’s right hand, Jesus Christ in glory.” One meditation was given for each of the 150 beads.

Around the year 1365, Henry of Kalkar, the Visitator of the Carthusian Order, grouped the 150 Angelic Salutations into decades and put an Our Father before each decade. Next, in about 1409, another Carthusian, Dominic the Prussian, wrote a book that attached a psalter of 50 thoughts about the lives of Jesus and Mary to a Rosary of 50 Hail Marys. This was the first time, as far as we know, that a special thought was provided for each Hail Mary: 14 made reference to the hidden life of Christ, 6 to the public life, 24 to his passion and death, and 6 to his glorification and that of Mary.

In turn, it did not take long before the 50 Hail Mary thoughts of Dominic the Prussian were divided, as Henry of Kalkar had done, into groups of ten with an Our Father in between. Afterwards fifteen Our Fathers along with meditations were reintroduced, but these were interspersed between every ten “Hail Mary” beads. This brought the total number of prayers and meditations for a complete rosary to 165. By 1470, when the Dominican Alan of Rupe founded the first Rosary Confraternity, he could refer to the Rosary with a special thought for each Hail Mary bead as the “new” Rosary (which he favored), while he referred to the form with the Hail Marys and no accompanying statements as the “old” Rosary.

Notice that it is from this form of Rosary with short thoughts or meditations attached to each Hail Mary that we have taken inspiration for the present Scriptural Rosary Book, albeit with antiphons taken directly from the whole of the Bible, and not just the Psalms.

The Modern Rosary

It was in the fifteenth century, when Europe moved from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, that the form of the Rosary with short thoughts was gradually abandoned for the Rosary with just the Our Fathers and Hail Marys.

Around this time, it became possible to reproduce easily and inexpensively woodcut picture prints. Picture Rosaries became immediately popular. But since it was difficult and expensive to draw and print 150 different pictures, the new picture Rosaries usually showed only fifteen pictures—one for each Our Father bead. This pictorial tradition is another antecedent we have taken into consideration in the making of our Scriptural Rosary.

At first, the ten Hail Marys thoughts were printed around each Our Father picture. But during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the use of the special Hail Mary thoughts gradually died out, and there remained only the fifteen brief Our Father thoughts which have survived as the fifteen Mysteries we know today (until Pope John Paul II added another five Mysteries to contemplate the public ministry of Christ).

Soon, however, spiritual people recognized a certain impoverishment in the ability of the Rosary to lead to contemplation. Supplementary prayers were then added to compensate for this situation, and they usually took the form of narratives or meditations to be read before praying each decade. Saint Louis de Montfort, the great preacher of devotion to Mary, wrote in about 1700 one of the most popular sets of fifteen meditations.

As a fruit of the Christian revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there appeared the first signs of a return to the medieval methods of praying the Rosary with short thoughts added to each bead. Following Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter inaugurating the year of the Rosary, the 16th of October 2002, this present Scriptural Rosary combines the experience of such a long spiritual tradition, helping you to rediscover the Rosary in the light of the Scriptures, in harmony with the liturgy, and with the help of beautiful, specially made pictures.

The Role of Saint Dominic

So far we have concentrated on giving a sketch of how the Rosary arose out of the meeting between the Church’s liturgy and popular devotion. However, there is a third element that Christian tradition has always associated to the Rosary: the role of Saint Dominic. He and the Order he founded fathered, in a definitive way, this devotion, ensuring its widespread practice, the perfecting of its form, and its theological grounding. Pope Saint Pius V, a Dominican, issued the Bull Consueverunt Romani Pontifices, with which he consolidated the essential configuration of the Rosary:

And so Dominic looked to that simple way of praying and beseeching God, accessible to all and wholly pious, which is called the Rosary, or Psalter of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in which the same most Blessed Virgin is venerated by the angelic greeting repeated one hundred and fifty times, that is, according to the number of the Davidic Psalter, and by the Lord’s Prayer with each decade. Interposed with these prayers are certain meditations showing forth the entire life of our Lord Jesus Christ, thus completing the method of prayer devised by the Fathers of the Holy Roman Church.

There is no lack of shortsighted historians who, on the grounds of the gradual evolution of the Rosary as we have just reviewed it, are anxious to say that Saint Dominic’s place in the origins of the Rosary is just a legend, especially if one considers that there are no written documents clearly linking Saint Dominic (1170–1221) to the Rosary until over two hundred years after his death. If we were to listen to these historians and not to tradition, out would go our glorious visions of our Lady giving Saint Dominic the Rosary to combat the spread of error! Down, we would say, with the superstition of many Popes supporting the old tradition!

The Voice of Tradition

The voice of tradition is well articulated in the reading from the Divine Office for the Forth lesson of Matins for the Feast of our Lady of the Rosary, which tells us:

When the wicked heresy of the Albigensians was growing in the district of Toulouse and striking deeper roots day by day, Saint Dominic… implored with earnest prayers the aid of the Blessed Virgin, whose dignity these errors shamelessly attacked and to whom it is given to destroy all heresies throughout the world. As everyone knows, she instructed Dominic to preach the Rosary to the people as a unique safeguard against heresy and vice, and he carried out this commission with wonderful ardor of soul and with great success.

Another example attesting to this tradition is found in the encyclical, Supremi Apostolatus Officio. Here Pope Leo XIII resoundingly restates the tradition. Explaining Dominic’s role in combating the Albigensians, he writes:

Great in the integrity of his doctrine, in his example of virtue, and by his apostolic labors, he [Saint Dominic] proceeded undauntedly to attack the enemies of the Catholic Church, not by force of arms, but trusting wholly to that devotion which he was the first to institute under the name of the Holy Rosary, which was disseminated through the length and breadth of the earth by him and his pupils. Guided, in fact, by divine inspiration and grace, he foresaw that this devotion, like a most powerful warlike weapon, would be the means of putting the enemy to flight, and of confounding their audacity and mad impiety.

Such is the dilemma. Did the Blessed Virgin give Saint Dominic the Rosary as a weapon against the impiety of the Albigensians or did it grow up on its own under the influence of the liturgy? How can Pope Leo XIII say that Saint Dominic was the “first to institute” the Rosary?

A Fitting Personification

Of course, there is no dilemma at all. This is a situation very similar to that of Pope Saint Gregory the Great instituting “Gregorian” chant—a sacred music with roots well developed before the times of Saint Gregory. All these are instances of preexisting materials, long prepared by the labors of men under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but which, all of a sudden, take on a very new and decisive role, usually in association with the special mission given by Heaven to a man or woman, who then becomes symbolically—because profoundly really—linked to them. They take the preexisting raw materials and give them the unmistakable form and stamp of their God–given genius. Saint Gregory the Great is properly represented with the Holy Spirit inspiring in his ear the place of “Gregorian” chant in the liturgy of the Church. Mary did appear to Saint Dominic and singled out the Rosary long prepared in the evolution of Christian piety as the weapon of choice against error.

And don’t worry about written records—few did in times past. Most historical facts we know today were not recorded until much later. We moderns give too much weight to written and printed records. We even take for granted literacy! Saint Dominic lived well before the invention of the printing press. Therefore, there would have been many fewer paper records and people’s memories would have been a lot sharper.

Mary, the Personification of the Church

What is true about Saint Dominic’s role in the Rosary of Mary, is true as well of our Lady herself. The greatest works of the Spirit are long prepared by the labors of men to dispose themselves properly for the reception of the Spirit’s gifts. Our Lady’s humanity was preserved from the stain of original sin by a special grace of God, yet she also came from an ancestral line often adorned with high sanctity.

Mary is the highest achievement of the Jewish and Christian People. All of our struggles to live the law of the Lord culminated under grace in a perfect temple to Yahweh, a living ark of the covenant, the chalice into which was poured the wine of the new creation. In this way Mary is like the liturgy; it too is a precious receptacle that receives and communicates the divine life. All of its beauties are a medium through which the beauty and holiness of the heavenly world are conveyed to earth.

Finally, let us use the Rosary, which grew out of the experience of liturgical prayer, to assist us in the necessary preparation to participate more fruitfully in the most powerful of all prayers, the prayer headed by Christ and carried out daily by his Mystical Body, the liturgy of the Church.