Christians have prayed The Lord's Prayer from the beginning one of the other prayers that Christians have prayed from the very beginning is what we have come to known as the Hail Mary hi my name is father Mike Schmitz and this is the Cent presents where do we get the rosary we take part half that prayer from sacred scripture where we say Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb now those are words from Luke's gospel as the angel Gabriel appears to
Mary he says those words hail full of grace right hail highly favored one and then when Mary visits Elizabeth she says blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb the last part of the prayer holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death it's an expression of the heart of every believer and the Heart of every believer is I have been given a mom from the cross as Jesus is on the cross he looks at his beloved disciple John he looks at his
mom and he says to his mother behold your son and says to John to the Beloved disciple behold your mother scripture says from that hour he took her into his home so that sense of from the cross Jesus gave us his mom as our mom because we're all beloved disciples first of all we have Christians who longed to pray Christians who wanted to pray and wanted to make prayer a part of their daily lives and so you have some who joined monasteries some who went into the Wilderness some who became nuns and and they closed
themselves off from the world and and they dedicated their lives to prayer and so they would gather every day and some of those monks would pray all 150 Psalms every single day now the people around them are saying hey hey how do we pray like you pray some of these monks and nuns who were in convents and monasteries would say well you don't have access to the scriptures on a daily basis like we do you don't and if you did you won't be able to read necessarily but you can pray every day at any moment
of the day you can sanctify every moment remember St Paul said it's to pray always pray unceasingly and so how about this how about you pray the Lord's Prayer as you go about your day how about you pray the Hail Mary as you go about your day how about you pray even a a phenomenal prayer called the Jesus prayer Lord Jesus Christ son of the Living God have mercy on me a sinner and in order to keep track of those prayers you can uh tie knots in a in a in a rope right and so
as you're working as you're going about your daily business you have this this rope with knots in it and you pray the Our Father The Lord's Prayer the Hail Mary the Jesus prayer a number of times throughout the day one good number of times would be if there's 150 Psalms how about this how about pray the Lord's Prayer 150 times or the Hail Mary or the Jesus prayer 50 times so you have this Evolution right of people who are praying getting into a pattern of prayer you might say well that sounds like kind of mindless
repetition just of saying the prayer over and over again and in some ways you might be right we'll talk about that later as well not in this video but in in a different video but what you have people doing is I'm taking the prayer that I would have in this in the quiet of my room and I'm bringing it in this silent unobtrusive but powerful way out into my life as I'm walking down the street and I'm just like no one else knows this but I'm just I'm praying that Jesus prayer I'm praying The Lord's
Prayer praying that Hail Mary now as things evolved sometimes people divided those up and said okay well doing 150 in a row might be a little rough like I might kind of actually lose focus so how about you reflect on a scene from The Lord's life now again over the course of hundreds of years leading up to about 1200 where there's a man named St Dominic and St Dominic uh and St Simon stock these these two kind of like Pioneers or champions of the as we know it right now would say okay how about this
you have 150 hail Maries throughout the course of the day you can divide those into groups of 10 start off a group of 10 or a decade right 10 decade with an Our Father close it with a glory B to the father son Holy Spirit right and then each one of those decades reflect on a scene from The Lord's life which led us to have uh the Joyful Mysteries the sorrowful mysteries and the Glorious Mysteries and if you add all of those Hail Marys up you have 150 just like you have 150 Psalms Christians did
this again from the 300s they had those those prayers on those beads or prayers on those knots and now here in 1200 with st Simon stock and St Dominic you had Christians who were regularly saying okay I'm going to reflect on the Lord's life so here's one of the Joyful Mysteries the Nativity right Christmas I mean how often do we think of Christmas how often we pray about Christmas in our normal daily lives unless we're praying the rosary and then at least once every couple days maybe even every day you get to reflect on the
mystery of the Incarnation the mystery of God humbling himself and entering into our lives or even the crucifixion sometimes we just leave that for Lent or leave that for Easter Holy Week when you're praying the rosary you get to reflect on that deep profound gift of love that Jesus gave to the world and so that's how people began to pray the rosary as we know it at one point in history the rosary was a powerful tool against a culture that was changing dramatic ically at one point of History the rosary was a powerful tool in
fact it was the weapon in the hands of Christians that was able to defeat an onslaught that was attacking Christian Europe there was a if you know the story there was uh a massive Muslim invasion of Europe after hundreds of years of of Muslims taking over the Middle East and North Africa and all these places that had been Christian violently overtaking these places here is this Muslim Navy that was attacking Europe and was threatening to gain a foothold in Europe and to overrun the entire continent of Europe and so the pope at the time said
okay Christians here's the deal um they're more powerful than we are they're they are uh more highly trained than than we are what do we have well we have a mom that was given to us from the cross and so let's turn to the rosary and the pope said let's pray to our lady that we have victory over this invading Fleet and so there's this battle called The Battle of lanto you can you can look it up there's GK Chesterton had written this kind of like Epic poem about the Battle of lanto but essentially the
short story is this all these Christians devoted themselves to praying for victory by asking our lady for help in the midst of this battle when the Muslim invading forces were guaranteed to win two things happened one is the winds shifted remarkably miraculously even and there was this cloud or fog cover that enabled the Christian Fleet to go around the Muslim Fleet and ultimately have Victory the pope credited that praying of the Rosary and the intercession of our Lady to the Victory and so there was originally established the feast of Our Lady of Victory in the
month of October and that that now has become Our Lady of the Rosary but originally It's Our Lady of Victory because why because here we are as Christians we are most likely not called to take up arms like physical violence arms against the culture that's most likely not what we're called to do any of us but we all are called to stand against the culture that is anti-god to stand against a culture that is Antichrist to stand against a culture that is anti-life and to do what to do what our ancestors did which is to
take up the rosary and ask through the intercession of our Lady ask the Lord for victory again this doesn't mean violence what this does mean is taking a stand and doing something and the remarkable thing is every Christian can do something by simply taking up the rosary and praying here's the last thing the rosary was massively important in my life when I first had an encounter with the Lord Jesus in the sacrament of confession I was immediately drawn to the rosary so Mary has had a massive massive role so I prayed the rosary almost every
day or wanted to pray the Rosary every day in high school into college and at some point I just kind of let it go because there's other ways to pray too and and that's fine a lot of times we can we can do that and then a number of years ago we had a speaker had came here the mom of one of our students she came and gave a talk she was going to give a talk on pro-life but instead she gave a talk on Mary on the rosary and one of the things she noted
was this she noted that whenever Mary has appeared in any Apparition any modern day Apparition at least the ones that I know about and ones that she knows about Mary has always had a message and the message is to repent or of course the message was to do Penance right to fast when we need to and to deny ourselves things but the third thing third message was to pray the rosary oh yeah of course I know that I know that our lady has told us you know to repent has told us to do Penance has
told us to pray the rosary but she made the point and she connected the dots for me she said okay so here's the deal Mary if she shows up right if she appears she's not doing that on her own she's doing that because she is sent by God directly to this people and not only is she sent by God directly the message she's giving is not her message this is the message that God wants his people to know and that made me stopped because she said that means that doing Penance repentance Ing and praying the
rosary is what God is asking of all of his people that if Jesus Is Our Lord if God in heaven is our father and if Jesus gave us his mother as our mother then he's asking us through Mary to pray the rosary which means that in some levels even though of course it's still a private devotion and even that Revelation is is private Revelation there's a little bit more urgy and a little bit more weight to that message because if that Apparition if those apparitions appearances of Mary are real in that message is real that
message is from the Lord God himself that he wants us he wants us to ask for Mary's intercession for our lives for the for the sake of our culture and for the sake of his church and for me that just convicted my heart and I was like oh wow I had really been laxed when it came to the rosary I need to pick that back up again I need to pray for myself my loved one for you I need to pray for our culture I need to pray for this world I need to pray for
those who who walk in darkness that they can see a great light so that's my invitation passing on the message of Mary to all of us anyways Rob here to S she presents my name is father Mike God bless [Music]
