It’s been said that whoever carries a rosary in their pocket or purse carries the entire liturgical year there as well. From Advent to Christmas, Epiphany to Holy Week and Easter, from Pentecost to the eschaton, the Mysteries of the rosary enable us to celebrate and contemplate the feasts and seasons of the liturgical year each day or week. This is especially the case with the contents of the Mysteries that most people know from the popular Dominican form promulgated by the sixteenth-century Dominican pope, Pius V, aided by the legend that the Virgin Mary originally gave the rosary to St. Dominic, and eventually even by the style of contemplation associated with the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.
But if the rosary is rightly called the liturgical year in a string of beads, today’s feast is not a feast of the rosary per se, but of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Our Lady of the Rosary. If this naturally directs our attention to the rosary itself, it does so because Mary is intimately connected to it through the repetition of the Hail Mary (the final form of which was also promulgated by Pope Pius V). But there is even a greater connection. Out of the now twenty Mysteries of the rosary, Mary appears directly in thirteen of them, underscoring her role and presence in the salvific events in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Hence, invoked throughout by the words of the Archangel Gabriel and her cousin Elizabeth, the rosary invites us to take Mary’s hand and walk with her through the great Mysteries of our salvation.

Maxwell E. Johnson

Maxwell E. Johnson is emeritus professor of theology (liturgy) at the University of Notre Dame, a retired pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and a canon of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. James in South Bend, Indiana. An oblate of Saint John’s Abbey, he is the author of several books on the liturgy and edited the breviary Benedictine Daily Prayer.