Each October, the Church reminds us to deepen our devotion to Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ and therefore the Mother of the Eucharist and the Mother of Mercy (see also Catechism of the Catholic Church #963-975).
On October 7, we honor Our Lady of the Rosary (a memorial that falls on a Sunday this year). When we pray the Rosary, we meditate on the life of Jesus Christ and His mother, with prayers from Luke 1 (“Hail Mary…”); Matthew 6 (“Our Father…”); and Matthew 28, Luke 1-2, Ephesians 3 and throughout the Bible (“Glory be…”). October is also Respect Life Month, reminding us to be a People of Life, defending God’s gift of life for all of His children, from conception to natural death (our parish family led by our Knights of Columbus will be participating on October 21 in the 40-Days-for-Life campaign; please see this bulletin for details).
The following is adapted from The Rosary of Our Lady (Msgr. Romano Guardini, Sophia Institute Press): The life of Mary, as the Gospel tells it, is as humanly true as it can possibly be, but in this human quality it is filled with a mystery of divine communion and love, the depth of which is unfathomable. The Rosary points in this direction.
Jesus is the substance of Mary’s life, just as the Child is the lifeblood of His mother, for whom He is the one and all… Not only was Mary’s existence as a human mother achieved in her relation to Jesus, but also her redemption. Becoming a mother, she became a Christian. By living with her Child, she lived with God whose living revelation He is. Growing humanly along with the Child, as do all mothers who really love, releasing Him on the road of life with so much resignation and pain, she ripened in God’s divine grace and truth…
The prayer of the Rosary means a lingering in the world of Mary, whose essence was Christ. In this way, the Rosary is, in its deepest sense, a prayer to Jesus Christ… We see how, in this prayer, the figure and life of Jesus occupies the foreground: not as He does in the Stations of the Cross, immediate and in itself, but through Mary, as the tenor of His life is seen and sensed by her, “keeping all these things carefully in her heart.”
The essence of the Rosary, then, is a steady incitement to holy sympathy… Our eyes meet two eyes that also love and see. Those eyes add their range of vision to ours, and our gaze may now go beyond the narrowness of our own ego and embrace the beloved being, previously seen only from one side…. Our Lord enables us to see and to love not only with our own sense but also with His. Something of this sort, only on a higher plane, happens with the Rosary.
With peace and prayers in Christ,
Fr. William
Saint Clement Parish 