When I was in fifth grade, I had a teacher who was famous for giving the same speech at the beginning of each school year. He would introduce himself, outline our curriculum, and lay out class rules. I’ve forgotten it all now, except that at one point he told us that we were allowed to carry a weapon—and then yanked out of his pocket a metal Rosary. A number of students were quite taken with the performance. They also began carrying around the Rosary in their pockets, sometimes whipping out the beads and brandishing them like swords.
I never did that. I was a self-serious child, and I was uncomfortable with the idea of prayer as a form of literal warfare. In my house we prayed the Rosary every night after dinner, and to me, its recitation was routine, no more extraordinary than grace before meals. That’s not to say it was only routine—a devotion to the Rosary is one of the greatest gifts my mother gave our family—but there was no bravado attached to it. I want to attribute this to simple piety, but more likely I was just too comfortable in my habits. Whatever the case, love for the Blessed Virgin Mary dressed with the language of militancy, even of the chivalrous sort, never held much appeal for me. Why should it have? I was a kid in suburban Northern Virginia, whose earliest exposure to war was through the voyeuristic television coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, and there was nothing noble about that.
A hesitancy toward battle is of course not the prevailing attitude among those who pray the Rosary with any frequency. Many of the popular saints of the twentieth century were perfectly comfortable with military language—in my circles the remarks of Saints Padre Pio and Josemaría Escrivá are often cited—and of course many others have spoken of it in this manner on back through the centuries to Lepanto, where the Rosary was actually employed as a weapon. Even before Pius V urged all of the faithful to pray it during that sea battle, he recommended the Rosary as the weapon by which Catholics could defend the Church, “tossed this way and that by so many heresies, and grievously troubled and afflicted by so many wars, and by the depraved morals of men.”
I confess that until recently I found all of this talk rather mystifying. Even G. K. Chesterton’s famous poem about Lepanto, so beloved by a certain sort of faithful young man, baffled more than inspired me. I earnestly want to defend the Church, but without presumption and without bombast. And I know I am not alone in this inclination. Perhaps that is only natural; it is difficult for anyone alive now to see the world through the eyes of the sixteenth century, where every event is suffused with the awe and horror of Final Judgement.
But something changed within me a few months ago. I was standing in the back of a church in rural Virginia—late, I had shown up very late for Mass—and the elderly priest was rambling in his homily about some piddling incident that had happened to him down at the gas station. He went on and on; it must have been half an hour. I tried my best to be charitable—no doubt he was a lonely man, stranded at the furthest reaches of his diocese—but soon I found myself thinking only of slipping out of the church, escaping the inanity, never coming back. When I have these thoughts during Mass I find them almost impossible to banish. I don’t need to rehearse all my grievances here; every Catholic has them, and they always seem to come rushing into the mind in those minutes right before the Consecration.
But it was in those minutes, right after I knelt down, that I noticed a plastic Rosary hung on the wall by the local Fatima guild. Almost by instinct, I picked it up and began to pray the Apostles’ Creed quietly to myself. I made it most of the way through the Glorious Mysteries by the time Mass ended. I finished with the Salve Regina as everyone else filed out of the church. It was not a proud moment. I had not offered a beautifully profound prayer or really even fulfilled my Sunday obligation, except in the most technical sense. But I had at least been distracted for about fifteen minutes from resenting the priest.
Only later on, when I was looking back on the incident, did I realize that I had used Rosary as a weapon, not against any external force, but against myself. And I think this is ultimately what the saints of the past eight centuries have meant when they speak of the devotion in martial terms. It’s of a piece with one of the central dramas of maturation. When you’re a child, you imagine that you will do battle with the worst evils of the world; when you grow up, you realize many of them are already inside you. Anyone who has read Middlemarch knows how deflating this realization can be: George Eliot writes knowingly of the many young women possessed of a “certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity” who, had they only some tool to help them develop a spiritual strength in otherwise unremarkable lives, could have been saints on the level with Teresa of Avila. “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing,” Eliot writes, “whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed.”
Most people with an inclination to goodness live in the hapless manner Eliot describes. The Rosary promises to guide and purify those inclinations. And with its use comes the realization that the battles fought in its pursuit are for the most part unseen skirmishes—rarely Lepantos—and most often against oneself.
