@Sigismund:
Yes, a fifteen-decade Rosary is traditionally a part of the Capuchin habit. However, St. Pio carried his in his POCKET and used it constantly, whereas many other people kept it on their belts until there was what I am sure they perceived as a more 'opportune' time to pray the Rosary.
I am not criticizing any other religious; don't read me wrong. I just want to point out that it's often not the BIG things that get neglected by people as they lose their sanctity and zeal for God; it's the LITTLE things that people start to leave off from, like saying the Rosary.
Our Lady did not give St. Dominic a laundry-list of hundreds of heroic efforts and giant tasks to do, in order that people might increase their faith and conform their wills more closely to God. She gave him a pattern (150) that people were familiar with, she gave him a method (the physical counting) that is conducive to concentration, and she gave him (and us) prayers that were either readily familiar to people or very easily memorized because they came from very familiar, commonly-heard passages of Scripture that dealt with some VERY important dogmas of the Church (the Annunciation, the Incarnation, Mary's perpetual Virginity and her role as intercessor).
What we need today, SO desperately, is NOT an army of people dedicated to building huge 'ministries' like the Prots try to do (like the Priests For Life people); neither is the solution to amass thousands and thousands of people to drive home some new devotion or some new 'trend' in spirituality (like the so-called charismatics or the people assuming the orans posture at the 'Our Father' of the NO).
We DON'T need people to get swept up in populist movements to excuse disobedience to the Church (and heresy) just because someone made the cover of Time magazine ('mother' Teresa, for instance, or the Ungreat Wojtyla).
No, what we need are for people to reach into their pockets, day after day, as they go about their lives, and PRAY Our Lady's Rosary. We need people to simply avail themselves of the Sacraments and all the great graces which come to us thereby.
We need the simple act of obeying Our Mother's wishes to become like an act of building a stone wall between us and sin, between us and Modernism and between us and the secular world's attractions. When you build a wall, it's not one hundred or fifty or even ten bricks at a time... it's ONE brick at a time, laid carefully and checked closely.
If we simply pray ONE Pater at a time, ONE Ave at a time, ONE Gloria at a time... not rushing from one Ave to the next, but REALLY concentrating on the Mysteries presented to us, and seizing each moment of our day that we are able for the sake of Christ and for the honor of His Mother, we can and WILL build that wall that will keep us out of sin and sin out of us.
Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary, pray for us.
Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.
Topic: Saw a 20-decade Rosary at a bookstore yesterday (Read 2505 times)