Letter of
Sister Lucy to Mother Martins
J.M.J.T.
Coimbra, September 16th, 1970
Dear Mother
Martins,
Pax Christi.
Regarding what you said about the prayer of
the Rosary, it is a pity because the prayer of the Rosary, or five decades of
it, after the Sacred Liturgy of the Eucharist, is what most unites us with God
by the richness of the prayers that compose it.
All
of them came from Heaven, dictated by the Father, by the Son and by the Holy
Spirit.
The Glory Be that we pray between decades was dictated by the Father to the
angels when He sent them to sing it near to His Word, the newborn Child. It is
also a hymn to the Blessed Trinity.
The Our Father was dictated by the Son,
and it is a prayer directed to the Father.
The Hail Mary is completely impregnated
both with a Trinitarian and a Eucharistic sense. The first words were dictated
by the Father to the Angel when He sent him to announce the mystery of the
Incarnation of the Word: “Hail [Mary]
full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” You are full of grace because in you dwells
the fountain of grace, and also because of your union with the most Blessed
Trinity.
Moved by the Holy Spirit, St. Elizabeth
said: “Blessed art thou among women, and
Blessed is the Fruit of thy womb” [Jesus].
The Church,
also moved by the Holy Spirit, added, “Holy
Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
This prayer is directed to God through the mediation of Mary. [The Church is
saying] because you are the Mother of God, pray for us.
The Hail Mary is a Trinitarian prayer
because Mary was the first living temple of the most Holy Trinity, evident from
the words of the Angel: “The Holy Spirit
shall come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee, and
therefore the Holy One to be born shall be called the Son of God.”
It is also
Eucharistic. Mary is the first living Tabernacle wherein the Father enclosed
His Son, the Word made flesh. Her Immaculate Heart is the first Monstrance to
hold Him. Her breast and her arms were the first Altar on which the Father
exposed His Son for adoration. There the Angels, the Shepherds and the Magi
adored Him.
Mary is the first … who held in her pure
and immaculate hands the Son of God. It was she who took Him to the Temple to
offer Him to the Father as a victim for the salvation of the world.
If we give to the Hail Mary its full
significance –all the beauty of these pious considerations—we see that it is
indeed a Trinitarian and a Eucharistic prayer, even more than a Marian one. I
do not know if we can find prayers more sublime or more appropriate to recite
before the Blessed Sacrament.
Moreover, after the Sacred Liturgy of the
Eucharist, the prayer of the Rosary is what best fosters within our spirit the
growth of the mysteries of Faith, Hope and Charity. It is the spiritual bread
of souls. The one who does not pray weakens and dies. It is in prayer that we
meet with God, and in this encounter, He imparts to us Faith, Hope, and
Charity. Without these virtues we cannot be saved.
Unfortunately, we cannot hopefully expect a
great number of souls to assist at daily Mass, but we can hope to bring a
greater number of them to recite the daily Rosary. This practice will preserve
and increase their faith, due to the prayer life it fosters and to the
mysteries of our Redemption which are remembered in each decade.
The Rosary is the prayer of the poor and
the rich, of the wise and the ignorant. To uproot this devotion from souls is
to deprive them of their daily spiritual bread. The Rosary helps to preserve
that flickering flame of faith that has not yet been completely extinguished
from many consciences. Even for those souls who pray without meditating, the
simple act of taking the beads in hand to pray is already a remembrance of
God—of the
supernatural.
And just the simple recollection of the mysteries before each decade is still
another ray of light sustaining the flicker of light in their souls.
That is why the devil has mounted against
it such a great attack. And the worst of it is that he has deluded
and deceived souls who bear a great responsibility because of their office.
They are the blind leading the blind. They seek in Vatican Council II support
for their positions, not realizing that the Holy Council ordered them to
preserve all the practices that in the course of the years had been fostered in
honor of the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God [emphasis added]; that the prayer of the Rosary is one of the most
important of these, and that, therefore, according to the decrees of the Holy
Council and the recommendations of the Holy Father, [it] is one we must
maintain.
I have great
hopes that, in the not too far distant future, the prayer of the Holy Rosary
will be proclaimed a liturgical prayer, because all its parts share in the
Sacred Liturgy of the Eucharist.
Let us pray, work and sacrifice and trust
that “Finally my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”
Lucia O.C.D.
Letter
published in booklet The Rosary And
The Crisis of Faith Fatima and World Peace by Msgr. Joseph A.
Cirrincione and Thomas A. Nelson; pp 14-16; published in 1986 by Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., Rockford,
IL 61105
