Category Archives: Rosary

Our Lady of Fatima and the Rosary – October 2, 2022

One overlooked aspect of Our Lady of Fatima is in the final October 1917 apparition is a trifold vision of the three mysteries of the rosary.  As most of the tens of thousands of onlookers witnessed the “dancing of the sun,” the three children Lucia, Francisco, and Marta witnessed visions of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  More precisely, Lucia saw a mystical triptych in the sky of the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries of the rosary.  Lucia describes the vision of the first scene of the Joyful Mysteries and the Holy Family:

“We beheld St. Joseph with the Child Jesus and Our Lady robed in white with a blue mantle, beside the sun.  St. Joseph and the Child Jesus appeared to bless the world, for they traced the Sign of the Cross with their hands.”  

In the next scene, Lucia alone saw the Sorrowful Mysteries represented by Our Lady of Dolors:

“I saw Our Lord and Our Lady; it seemed to me that it was Our Lady of Sorrows.  Our Lord appeared to bless the world in the same manner as St. Joseph had done.” 

In the final scene, Lucia witnessed the Glorious Mysteries represented by Our Lady of Mt. Carmel:

“and I saw Our Lady once more this time resembling Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.”

The Blessed Virgin Mary had foretold to the shepherd children a month before in September that they would see this threefold vision of mysteries of the rosary:  “In October, Our Lord will also come, as well as Our Lady of Sorrows and Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and Saint Joseph with the Child Jesus, to bless the world.”  

Joyful Mysteries

In the first vision of the Joyful Mysteries, Mary and Joseph are present with the Christ Child—the Holy Family.  Heaven is emphasizing the dignity of marriage and family life.  Family life is one of the central messages of Fatima.  Heaven calls us to sanctify marriage and our families.  St. Joseph is present as the father figure and husband who blesses the world.  This shows the critical importance of the role of fathers and the family as a whole, especially in our age of endemic broken families and absentee fathers.    

Sorrowful Mysteries

In the second vision of the Sorrowful Mysteries, Lucia sees Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows.  Heaven shows that we must be willing to take up our daily Cross and follow after Christ.  This involves daily penance and reparation for our sins and the sins of others.  The Blessed Virgin Mary told the shepherd children in the August 13 apparition to: “Pray, pray very much, and make sacrifices for sinners; for many souls go to hell, because there are none to sacrifice themselves and pray for them.”  The central message of Fatima is prayer, penance, and reparation for sin in order to save souls.  

Glorious Mysteries

In the third and final vision of the Glorious Mysteries, Lucia sees Our Lady of Mt. Carmel—Mary as the Queen of Heaven.  Our earthly lives of struggle and death are not the end of us.  We have the glorious hope of attaining salvation and the heavenly crown of eternal life.  Sister Lucia described Our Lady of Mt. Carmel as emblematic of total consecration to God.  As Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Mary came bearing the brown scapular offering it to us to wear it as a sign of our consecration to her Immaculate Heart.      

Sister Lucia would later affirm, according to Carmelite priest Fr. Howard Rafferty in an interview on August 15, 1950 that: “The rosary and brown scapular are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other.” 

It was not by accident that in each monthly apparition at Fatima, the Blessed Virgin Mary asked the children to pray the rosary every day. This daily recitation is part of our path to Heaven.  In the October apparition, she also described herself as: “I am the Lady of the Rosary.”

Years later, in Pontevedra, Spain on December 10, 1925, Jesus and Mary again appeared to now Sister Lucia.  The Blessed Virgin Mary showed Sister Lucia her Immaculate Heart covered with thorns “which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment.”  She asked Lucia to make reparation for these offenses by fulfilling the Five First Saturdays devotion.  The Blessed Virgin Mary promised her:

“I promise to assist at the hour of death, with the graces necessary for salvation, all those who, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, shall confess [their sins], receive Holy Communion, recite five decades of the rosary, and keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the fifteen mysteries of the rosary, with the intention of making reparation to me.”  

This is an amazing promise!  October is a time to re-consecrate ourselves to the Blessed Virgin Mary through daily prayer of the mysteries of the rosary, wearing the brown scapular, and making the first Five Saturdays devotion. Heaven deemed these practices of eminent importance for the salvation of souls to have emphasized these truths in one of the most miraculous apparitions in Church history.  Surely, these holy practices are beneficial for our salvation.   

Our path to Heaven is through prayer, penance, sacrifice, conversion, Confession, and worthily receiving Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.  The mysteries of the rosary are our daily help to bring us step-by-step, and bead-by-bead, to our Heavenly home.  Our Lady of Fatima promised us.    

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Kecharitomene – March 1, 2019

The word “kecharitomene” (κεχαριτωμένη) is used only once in the Greek New Testament.  It does not appear anywhere else in Greek literature.  The Gospel writer, Luke, appears to have created it out of thin air. This Greek word is, in some respects, very much reminiscent of another Greek word seemingly created out of thin air in the Gospels, “epiousios” (ἐπιούσιον), which also only appears in Jesus’ Our Father prayer.  Epiousios is translated as our “daily” bread but its literal meaning is our “super-substantial” bread, as translated in the Douay-Rheims bible, based off of St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation.  It was a special, singular word to express a special, singular phenomenon – the Bread of Life.  Epiousios is translated in most modern translations as “daily,” however, the literal meaning that St. Jerome conveyed, hints at the Eucharist, the bread above material substance.  

In a similar manner, Mary is a special, singular creature in Salvation History.  She became the Tabernacle where Christ would dwell. Mary is the new Ark of the Covenant where God would dwell in her womb.  Christ, the Son of God, was clearly without sin and second Person of the Trinity.  How could Jesus a Person of the Godhead dwell anywhere but somewhere immaculately pure and clean?  He could not co-dwell somewhere with sin.  That is impossible.  The archangel Gabriel came to the Virgin Mary at the moment of the Annunciation and declared to her, “Hail, full of grace.” (Lk. 1:28)  He seems to address her more with a title than descriptive language.  He addresses her more for who she is rather than what she is.  Who is she?  She is “full of grace.”  Eighteen hundred years later, Mary came to St. Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France referring to herself as, “I am the Immaculate Conception.”  Mary was reiterating the words of Gabriel in Luke 1:28.  The Immaculate Conception is the one full of grace.

How could one have been “full of grace” before the life, death, and resurrection of Christ? According to Ineffabilis Deus, Mary was given the sanctifying grace of Jesus Christ, her Son, by way of anticipation of His Redemption.  This is the underlying teaching of the Immaculate Conception.  Mary was preserved from Original Sin to make her a suitable dwelling place for the Second Person of the Trinity.  The Immaculate Conception made possible the Incarnation.  The Annunciation led directly to the Incarnation, as Mary gave her fiat to do the will of the Lord. Kecharitomene is the Greek word St. Luke used for the angel Gabriel’s address to Mary as “full of grace.”  In the Rosary, we pray over and over, these special and singular words of the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation and the Incarnation, “Hail Mary, full of grace.”  We are invoking the name of Mary, Kecharitomene, over and over again.  She is “Full of Grace” and “the Immaculate Conception.”  Mary is the Theotokos, the Mother of God, “the woman,” who crushes the head of the serpent, through her seed, the Messiah.  Kecharitomene was that blip in the matrix, where the devil was undone.  Sin was undone in one creature, preserved in grace, in order to bear the Savior of the world.  

Just another reason to pray your five decades of the Rosary every day!        

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“The Snake and the Rosary” of St. John Bosco – November 12, 2017

Dreams are a product of our unconscious mind and imagination. To pay too much attention to them is foolhardy. The inspired writer Sirach wrote “dreams give wings to fools.” (Sir. 34:1) But, not all dreams are created equal. Some dreams are more than just unconscious renderings of our conscious lives. In some rare cases, dreams are inspired visions from heaven. Mary and Joseph were “warned in a dream” not to return to Herod. The wife of Pilate warned him to release Jesus “for I have suffered much over him today in a dream.” It is of this latter version, that of prophetic dreams, that filled the life of St. John Bosco. The Forty Dreams of St. John Bosco details some of these dream-visions that he experienced.

St. John Bosco was an Italian priest who lived in the 19th century helping and educating youth, particularly disadvantaged young boys. Many of the vision-like dreams revolved around the state of the boys’ souls in his Oratory. The dreams often involved the boys with weapons in fierce battles against gruesome animals and beasts. The weapons were metaphors for the sacraments and devotions, while the animals and beasts were various sins and vices. The dreams were a sublime rendering of our internal struggles between virtue and vice, innocence and sin, heaven and hell. The prophetic nature of the dreams revealed the actual state of the boys’ souls. They also revealed the hidden spiritual realities of the Catholic faith. These remain completely relevant to us too. Imagine if St. John Bosco were still alive today, how troubled would his dreams be by the state of our souls?

One of the prototypical dream-visions St. John Bosco had concerned “The Snake and the Rosary.” In it, he and the boys were in a meadow where a stranger took him to see “a huge, ugly snake, over twenty feet long.” The stranger impelled him to dangle a rope over the snake, which he was quite hesitant to do out of fear. He finally agreed to hold the rope over the menacing snake, and the snake leaped up and “ensnared itself as in a noose.” The snake then furiously writhed to free itself but ended up tearing itself to pieces. The stranger then took the rope and put it in a box saying “watch carefully.” Then, opening the box he saw the rope had taken the shape of the words “Ave Maria” or “Hail Mary.” The man then explained to him that the snake is a symbol of the devil and the Ave Maria rope stands for the Rosary – with which “we can strike, conquer, and destroy all of hell’s demons.”

The dream, however, was not done. In the second part of the dream, the boys of the Oratory were now congregated around the remnants of flesh from the snake. Then, against St. John Bosco’s protests that it was poisonous, some of the boys began to pick up the snake flesh and eat it saying, “It’s delicious!” They promptly crumpled to the ground, with their bodies swelled and hardened like stone. The saint tried vigorously to keep them from eating the meat but they just kept eating it. He questioned the stranger why do they keep eating the meat even though it will kill them? The stranger replied, “Because the sensual man does not perceive the things that are of God!” He pleaded to the stranger that there must be some way to save them. To which, the stranger said there is, by “anvil and hammer.” St. John Bosco then put the boys on an anvil and hit them with a hammer. With that, most of the boys were “restored to life and recovered.” The stranger then explained to him that the anvil and hammer are symbols respectively for Holy Communion and Confession. By Confession we strike away at sin, and by Holy Communion we are sustained.

St. John Bosco constantly stressed this theme, “Frequent and sincere Confession, frequent and devout Communion.” This was reflected in many dreams. For example, in another dream, the boys fought with two-pronged pitchforks against ferocious animals. He was shown that the two-prongs symbolized a “good Confession and a good Communion.” In yet another terrifying dream, St. John Bosco saw boys running down a road and being caught in traps and pulled into hell. God, however, left implements next to the traps so the boys could cut themselves free. There were two swords symbolizing a “devotion to the Blessed Sacrament – especially through frequent Holy Communion – and to the Blessed Virgin.” There was also a hammer “symbolizing Confession,” and knives symbolizing devotions to St. Joseph and various saints.

In perhaps his most famous dream, he saw a large ship, representing the Church, in a violent storm and under attack. The Pope guided the ship to two large columns, at which, the ship docked and was saved. On the one column was a statue of the Virgin Mary with the title “the Help of Christians;” and, at the top of the other larger column was a Eucharist Host entitled “the Salvation of the Faithful.” St. John Bosco explained: “Only two means are left to save her amidst the confusion: Devotion to Mary Most Holy and frequent Communion.”

In our modernist era besieged by materialist confusion, the dreams of St. John Bosco are all the more urgent. The attacks are particularly diabolical against young people, seducing them to believe that there is no God or absolute morality, and no eternal consequences. Anything goes! The devil lies hidden before our secular eyes. This makes the risk of succumbing to mortal sin, and potentially damnation, all the more terrifyingly ominous. Sadly, as the percentage of Catholics decrease, the number of those without religious affiliation expands (the so-called “rise of the nones”). If youth were so imperiled in the 19th century, how much more endangered are souls in the 21st century with the falling away en masse from the Church, the unmooring of morality, particularly in sexual promiscuity of all sorts, and so much more. The monsters of St. John Bosco’s dreams are running wild today.

The Church, however, is here to aid us in the battle. It is our field hospital, present on the battlefield to heal our wounds and save our souls. She helps us grow in virtue and slay the beasts. The saint’s solution for us was simple: innocence preserved in penance. He said one good Confession could restore us to our title “of Son of God.” As the dreams of St. John Bosco reveal, our salvation is found in prayer, frequent Confession and Communion, Adoration, and recourse to Mary and the Rosary.

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