Criticize or Rejoice?
The Rosary often has been prayed in times of great suffering and danger, think of Pope Pius V and the Battle of Lepanto. And many think of it as a weapon against evil; we can thank The Atlantic magazine for distorting the meaning of the Rosary as a weapon1 (we already knew that but not in the way they thought2) and also thank it for increasing Rosary sales.3 When we think of suffering and the Rosary, what immediately comes to mind is the Sorrowful Mysteries, Christ suffering and dying for our sins and his love for us, the Father sending his only Son to die for us. Pope John Paul II explains: “The sequence of meditations begins with Gethsemane, where Christ experiences a moment of great anguish before the will of the Father, against which the weakness of the flesh would be tempted to rebel. There Jesus encounters all the temptations and confronts all the sins of humanity, in order to say to the Father: ‘Not my will but yours be done.’”4 It also calls to mind our own suffering: physically from sickness, old age, infirmity, disability; mentally from the cruelty of others, loss of friends or home, the death of loved ones, just enduring the few years under COVID-19 restrictions, the downturn in the economy, the violence in our cities, the wars in Ukraine and Israel, the loss of faith we see in those around us which stabs us in the heart.
So we know physical suffering and mental suffering, but there is another kind of suffering that we all go through. This suffering comes from the root word for “patient,” as in a patient in the care of a physician. The root of “patient,” or patiens in Latin, is, patior, “to suffer or bear.” Patients suffer from pain or illness, but they also suffer in the sense that they allow the physician to minister to them. They are passive, they allow the care to be done to them. Suffering of this third kind is an act of the will, we allow something to be done to us, we bear it.
It is easy to find physical and mental suffering in the Rosary mysteries. But suffering of the third kind can also be found in the other mysteries of the Rosary. In the Joyful Mysteries, the most obvious is that Mary and Joseph suffered when they thought that Jesus was lost. But also in the third sense of “suffer,” Mary suffered to bear Christ; she allowed it to be done to her. Mary’s fiat means just that: Let it be done (to me). And Jesus suffered to become a human being, an infant, even though he was God.
In the Luminous Mysteries, Jesus physically suffered hunger and thirst when praying in the desert for forty days before announcing the Kingdom of God. And he suffered mentally at the Last Supper knowing he would be betrayed by Judas and also by Peter who would deny him three times. And in the third sense of suffering, he also suffered baptism at the hands of John the Baptist even though he was sinless and had no need to repent. And he suffered to do as Mary asked at the Wedding at Cana even though his hour had not yet come.
In the Glorious Mysteries, at the Ascension, Jesus suffered mentally (in his human nature) knowing that his Apostles didn’t yet understand fully what had happened, asking that he stay with them. He said that he must go so that he could send the Paraclete to them. He spent three years with them, 24x7, as we say; and they still didn’t understand. At the Resurrection in the third sense of suffering, Jesus suffered to raise his human, now glorified, body from the dead. And Mary suffered to be assumed into heaven. There is a distinction here: while Jesus ascended into heaven, Mary was assumed into heaven. One is an active verb and one is passive. Mary allowed it to happen to her.
Pope John Paul II concludes: “It could be said that each mystery of the Rosary, carefully meditated, sheds light on the mystery of man.”5 We suffer physically and mentally, and we see human sufferings in all the mysteries of the Rosary. So also we see the third kind of suffering, the suffering that allows things to be done to us, the suffering that bears patiently those things. Let us pray certainly that our physical and mental suffering be relieved and that of those for whom we pray, and let us also pray that we suffer patiently, following Mary’s example, her fiat, and the example of the Son of God descending to become a human being, that we allow God to work in us and on us and through us.
1 Daniel Panneton, “How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-opt the Rosary,” The Atlantic, August 14, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/radical-traditionalist-catholic-christian-rosary-weapon/671122/.
2 Many popes and saints have called the Rosary a weapon, a weapon in a spiritual battle, that is. See, for example, Fr. Mario Attard, OFM, Cap, “The Power of the Holy Rosary,” Catholic Insight, October 7, 2021, https://catholicinsight.com/the-power-of-the-holy-rosary/. See also Rugged Rosaries who make rosaries similar to those given to soldiers in WWI which were made strong so as to survive the conditions of war, https://ruggedrosaries.com/pages/about-us-1.
3 Joe Bukuras, “Rosaries Are Flying Off the Shelves after ‘The Atlantic’ Article Suggests Link to ‘Extremism,’” Catholic News Agency, August 16, 2022, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/252046/rosaries-atlantic-extremism.
4 Pope John Paul II, Rosarium virginis Mariae, no. 22, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/2002/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_20021016_rosarium-virginis-mariae.html.
5 Ibid., no. 25.