History of the Rosary

The Rosary
by Garry Wills

(Page 3 of 4)

Background

In order to say the rosary, one does not need to know much if anything about the history of the practice. It was for a long time shrouded in legend. But it may help one's devotion to know what deep roots the practice has in the biblical, conciliar, and ecclesiastical past. Awareness that one's prayer continues that of a long line of saints and scholars may bring increased appreciation of what it means to be one member of the mystical body of Christ praying with so many other members.

According to a legend once endorsed by popes and celebrated in famous paintings, the Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans), and presented him with the first rosary. That was in the thirteenth century. Modern research has found three things wrong with this story. First, early biographies and paintings of Dominic - along with early documents of his order - do not connect him with the rosary. The legend is not mentioned for two centuries after his death. Second, the saying of repeated Our Fathers or Hail Marys with the help of beads long predates Dominic. Third, the linking of contemplated gospel mysteries with the recitation of the prayers - which we consider essential to the rosary - long postdates Dominic.

The medieval roots of the rosary lie in the effort of lay-people to have their own extended prayer, an equivalent to the Divine Office said and sung by monks and friars. The office was a complex set of biblical and hagiographical readings, of prayers and of hymns, each part keyed to a different time of the day in the different seasons of the year. A briefer form of this, a breviary, was created for itinerant (mendicant) orders that did not have a monastery to keep the eight different hours of the full office. All Western Catholic priests were required to say the breviary until after the Second Vatican Council. For laypeople, something simpler was required. Books of prayers for certain little hours were invented, but even these were suitable only for the educated and (usually) the wealthy - a fact attested by the beautiful illustrations in the Books of Hours that are the pride of museums today. The problem of supplying a "lay office" continued. To avoid the complexity of different combinations of different kinds of prayer, the straightforward recitation of all 150 psalms was tried. When this proved too long or trying a task, the psalter was split into three parts, so fifty psalms were recited at any one time. These numbers - 150, 100, and 50 - would be important to the development of the rosary.

The recitation of the psalms was still a complex matter. For ordinary Christians it was important to have a prayer that could be said without using a book. Instead of reciting 150 psalms, why not just say the Our Father (Pater Noster) 150 times - shortening that number, if necessary, as the psalter had been shortened, to 100 or to 50 repetitions? The Our Father was the one prayer all Christians were supposed to know; it was in the Bible (Matthew 6.9-13), and instruction in it was part of the ancient baptismal discipline. Though the psalms were no longer being recited, the canonical numbers (150 or 100 or 50) gave this exercise the name the Pater Noster psalter, and it was later called the Pater Noster rosary. Saying the same prayer over and over required a counting device, which is what the beads provided. A set of such beads was itself called a Pater Noster, and artisans created them in workshops like those along Pater Noster Row in London.

The Hail Mary (Ave Maria) did not exist in its current form until the fifteenth century. But when it became popular, it too was said to the beads 150 (or 100, or 50) times. Soon the Ave Maria rosary became more popular than the Pater Noster rosary. But this exercise, like its forerunner, was still just a matter of repeating one prayer over and over. The idea of articulating the parts of the rosary to consider different episodes in the life of Christ was explored in the fourteenth century.

But it was not till the early fifteenth century that a rationalized scheme for such contemplation of Christ's life became well known. The innovator was Dominic of Prussia (1382-1460), a Carthusian monk and author who was born in Poland and died at Trier.

In keeping with the psalm-based numerology of all these exercises, Dominic proposed fifty events in Christ's life for contemplation. He claims to have had a vision in which a tree had fifty leaves, each devoted to a single gospel episode. This was perhaps suggested by the "visual New Testaments" of the middle ages - paintings that portrayed the life of Christ in a series of separate panels. (Duccio's famous altarpiece in Siena devoted sixty-two of its seventy-five panels to the life of Christ.)

To keep track of the episode being meditated on, Dominic adjusted each Hail Mary to include the episode. Thus: "And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, whose birth was announced by the angel," or"...the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem." These insertions are still made in some places, a practice commended by Paul VI (46) and John Paul II (33). A critic of Dominic of Prussia, the Dominican priest Alanus de Rupe (1428-1475) thought he had shortchanged the gospel by not giving the full psalter number of 150 episodes. But the practical difficulty of dealing even with fifty events led to a shortening and categorizing of episodes; by the sixteenth century they had been sorted into three sets of five episodes, each set of episodes thematically linked as glad, sad, or glorious. The number fifty was retained, since the beads of the five decades in each set numbered fifty.

It was Alanus de Rupe who, perhaps in opposition to Dominic of Prussia, popularized the story that the founder of his own order was also the initiator of the rosary prayer. His fellow Dominicans picked up this notion with enthusiasm and made it the reigning view for centuries. Alanus formed a Confraternity of the Psalter of the Glorious Virgin Mary at Douai around 1470. It soon had many chapters and imitators, making the rosary immensely popular on a broad front of the Western church. (The Eastern church has its own form of the prayer beads, usually 100, known as the kombologion.) It should be remembered that all this activity took place before the Reformation, so that the rosary is part of the history of Protestants as well as Catholics. Anglicans remind us that devotion to Saint Mary is not confined to Catholics, since Mary says in Luke's gospel, "I shall be called blessed down the generations" (Luke 1.48).

Unfortunately, the rosary did become a partisan symbol of Catholicism. Some religious orders wore a huge set of the beads hanging from the belts of their habits - beads not so much for actual use in prayer but as a kind of defiant emblem. Anti-Catholics sometimes mocked the devotion to mere beads. In 1906, when the British author Hilaire Belloc ran for Parliament in the Liberal Party, he spoke defiantly on the stump:

Gentlemen, I am a Roman Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary out of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that he has spared me the indignity of being made your representative.

Belloc's biographer Robert Speaight observes: "After a shocked silence, there was a thunder-clap of applause."

© 2006 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.