Rosary

The word reminds us of a rose garland that crowns the Virgin Mary: these flowers are actually each of the prayers that believers recite to contemplate the mysteries of the life of Christ through prayer and the life of Mary. Among these mysteries we count, at least since the sixteenth century, the joyful, the sorrowful, and the glorious. Saint John Paul II proposed the addition to these three a set of luminous mysteries. The meditation of these mysteries enables the faithful to welcome Jesus, the Word made flesh, with the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation by angel Gabriel, and then to follow him with her in the stages of his life to the glory of heaven. Each mystery is composed of ten « Hail Marys » and begins with the « Our Father ». The prayer of a dozen is concluded by a Doxology (« Glory to the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit »). Also called « Rosary » is the object itself consisting of 169 beads that we slide between our fingers for each prayer: the 150 main beads, divided into 15 decades, recall the number of biblical psalms and form a « Psalter of Mary ». Wearing the Rosary to the left side of the belt is characteristic of the Dominican habit. The object commonly named a Rosary corresponds therefore to a third of the traditional Rosary. Its name evokes a flower that that was worn during certain processions in the middle ages. From the fifteenth century, the Dominicans spread the devotion of the Rosary by creating confraternities of the Rosary, gathering the faithful at regular intervals to engage in this devotion in the side chapels of churches appointed and decorated for this purpose.