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Our Peace

The Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, which John Paul II chose as a way to revive the ancient Marian prayer, is aimed especially at families, with the addition of five new mysteries, called “Luminous Mysteries.”

BY ANDREA TORNIELLI

“Simple yet profound, the Rosary still remains, at the dawn of this third millennium, a prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness. It blends easily into the spiritual journey of the Christian life, which, after two thousand years, has lost none of the freshness of its beginnings and feels drawn by the Spirit of God to ‘set out into the deep’ (duc in altum!) in order once more to proclaim, and even cry out, before the world, that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, ‘the way, and the truth, and the life.’” With these words from his Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, John Paul II chose to revive the ancient Marian prayer, proposing it to the Christian people and especially to families as a way of contemplating the face of Christ, rediscovering family unity, and asking for peace in a world torn apart by terrorism and war. “A number of historical circumstances also make a revival of the Rosary quite timely,” the Pope writes. “First of all, the need to implore from God the gift of peace… At the start of a millennium which began with the terrifying attacks of September 11, 2001, a millennium which witnesses every day in numerous parts of the world fresh scenes of bloodshed and violence, to rediscover the Rosary means to immerse oneself in contemplation of the mystery of Christ who ‘is our peace’… Consequently, one cannot recite the Rosary without feeling caught up in a clear commitment to advancing peace, especially in the land of Jesus, still so sorely afflicted and so close to the heart of every Christian. A similar need for commitment and prayer arises in relation to another critical contemporary issue: the family, the primary cell of society, increasingly menaced by forces of disintegration on both the ideological and practical planes.”

The Pope, signing the letter on the morning of October 16th, the twenty-fourth anniversary of his election, proclaimed the year from October 2002 to October 2003 the “Year of the Rosary,” and established the significant addition of five new mysteries, called the Luminous Mysteries, recalling five episodes of the public life of Jesus. John Paul II tells of the importance of the Rosary in his own life: “I have entrusted so many worries to it, and I have always found comfort in it. Twenty-four years ago, on October 29, 1978, just two weeks after my election to the Throne of Peter, opening my heart, as it were, I used these words, ‘The Rosary is my favorite prayer. A wonderful prayer! Wonderful in its simplicity and profundity…’”

In just a few words, the Pope cleared the field of objections from a certain post-Vatican II intelligentsia which is contrary to all forms of popular devotion. But he issued a call to overcome any kind of mechanical recitation. “Mary’s contemplation is above all a remembering,” he writes. “We need to understand this word in the biblical sense of remembrance (zakar) as a making present of the works brought about by God in the history of salvation. The Bible is an account of saving events culminating in Christ Himself. These events not only belong to ‘yesterday’; they are also part of the ‘today’ of salvation.”

John Paul II thus proposed the addition of five new mysteries, to be recited on Thursdays. They are the Baptism of Christ, the wedding in Cana, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God with the call to conversion, the Transfiguration, and the institution of the Eucharist. The Pope suggests following the announcement of each mystery with a brief Bible reading devoted to it and fixing one’s gaze on an image evoking that mystery. “Announcing each mystery,” he writes in the letter, “and perhaps even using a suitable icon to portray it, is as it were to open up a scenario on which to focus our attention… This is a methodology, moreover, which corresponds to the inner logic of the Incarnation: in Jesus, God wanted to take on human features. It is through His bodily reality that we are led into contact with the mystery of His divinity.”