I've been giving a series of talks on the letters & encyclicals of JPG and was preparing to address the Apostolic Letter on the Rosary. If you haven't read it, you owe it to yourself to do so --a scant 22 pages, and very accessible. The letter is a companion to the Encyclical on the Eucharist, and the two documents together are tools JPG wanted to offer the faithful for "contemplating the face of Christ," as he urged Christians to do anew at the dawn of the new millennium. To pray the rosary is to contemplate the essential moments of our salvation, discovering Christ through the eyes of the one who knew him best --who, indeed, gave him his human face. In that sense, the rosary is like the theotokos icon, in which Mother & Child gaze lovingly at one another, but also mysteriously outward, drawing the gazer into their gaze.
In his introduction, JP says that his letter points to the anniversary of a Leo XIII encyclical, Supremi Apostolatus Officio, which he describes as "a document of greath worth." So, to understand what JP was pointing to, I just read Leo's letter. It's very short, and very enlightening about what was on JP's heart. His (JP's) own letter is eminently encouraging, showing that the rosary is a Christ-centered prayer, suggesting means to get more out of its recitation, and introducing the Luminous Mysteries. But his reference to Leo's letter places his teaching in the line of popes who urged the faithful to pray for the Church in a time of great crisis. Leo, writing to bishops in 1883, after cataloging the numerous times the Church was saved from the brink of destruction by Mary's intercession (not least being the miraculous victory of the West at Lepanto, the celebration of which caused Pius V to institute today's feast), says:
You have before your eyes, Venerable Brethren, the trials to which the Church is daily exposed; Christian piety, public morality, nay, even faith itself, the supreme good and beginning of all the other virtues, all are daily menaced with the greatest perils.
7. Nor are you only spectators of the difficulty of the situation, but your charity, like Ours, is keenly wounded; for it is one of the most painful and grievous sights to see so many souls, redeemed by the blood of Christ, snatched from salvation by the whirlwind of an age of error, precipitated into the abyss of eternal death. Our need of divine help is as great today as when the great Dominic introduced the use of the Rosary of Mary as a balm for the wounds of his contemporaries.
Have you seen the bumper sticker that says "Angry? Need a weapon? Pray the Rosary." At the end of his life, that's what JP was telling us. Happy Feast of the Rosary.
