The Rosary is a Wymyn's prayer.

[patrice]

" . . . . blessed is the fruit of thy womb . . . " It is a prayer about all of humanity in Mary and her child Jesus.

[scarlet_owl]

1. The Rosary is my favorite prayer of all time.

I say it whenever I can.

[patrice]

5. I like the way that it is a story with stories inside of it. n/t

[whistle]

2. You mean all of those beads are about fertility prayers?

[bitchkitty]

3. Rosary is not a prayer, it's a series of prayers.

But I guess you could say that Mary is a woman's God. But her divinity lies in the fact that she supposedly never used her vagina like the rest of us. And Catholicism can hardly be called a woman's religion in itself.

Fear of women is present in nearly all major religions today, in one form or another.

[Lucky Luciano]

4. I am glad I am not religious...

No fear of women here!

:evilgrin:

[patrice]

6. I didn't say that at all. You did.

I'm more than a vagina.

[patrice]

7. If you knew more about the Rosary, perhaps you'd see what

a mischaracterization this is " . . . a woman's God." The Rosary has nothing to do with that and that is one of the things I like best about it.

[Southsideirish]

8. I read somewhere that the first part of it "Hail Mary" through the part

that ends with "the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." was taken from the New Testament but the second part ("Holy Mary, Mother of God...") was added by the Church at a later date.

[Dcitizen]

9. duplicate

[Dcitizen]

10. Some notes of the development of the rosary

It is said that the Holy Mother gave the rosary to St. Dominic (1170-1221), the founder of the Dominican order. Although Dominicans have been great promoters of the rosary down through history, the rosary as we know it today took several centuries to develop, and its route was nothing if not circuitous.

The ultimate source of the rosary as a prayer form is the Book of Psalms in the Bible, writes Dominican Father Frederick M. Jelly, in Madonna: Mary in the Catholic Tradition. From the very beginning, the Church claimed the psalms as part of its Jewish heritage and placed their recitation at the heart of its liturgy and daily prayer. The practice of praying an Our Father instead of a psalm caught on in the early medieval period, and this marked the birth of the rosary devotion. "In order to keep count of the prayers," Father Jelly writes, "strings of beads were used, and these would gradually become our rosary beads."

Soon, to each of the 150 Our Fathers people began to add a short phrase about Jesus and Mary, thus linking vocal prayer to contemplation of the mysteries of the faith. Then, they substituted brief meditations on Jesus and Mary from the Annunciation to the Resurrection of Jesus and the Assumption of Mary.

According to Father Jelly, in the early 15th century a Carthusian monk, Dominic of Prussia, helped to popularize this devotion by linking 50 Hail Marys with 50 phrases about Jesus and Mary. "This is the origin of the word rosary, since the series of 50 points of meditation was called a rosarium (rose garden)." The rose, a symbol of joy, referred to Mary, and "rosary" came to refer to the recitation of 50 Hail Marys.

About the same time, another Carthusian, Henry Kalkar, contributed further to the development of the rosary by organizing the Hail Marys into groups of ten (decades), with an Our Father before each.

By 1480, rosaries of 50 mysteries, one for each Hail Mary, had been reduced to 5 mysteries, one for each decade. "In 1483," Father Jelly writes, "Our Dear Lady's Psalter, a rosary book by a Dominican, makes mention of 15 mysteries, all of which are the same as we have today except the final two glorious mysteries." The anonymous Dominican author combined Mary's Assumption and Coronation into one mystery and named the Last Judgment as the final glorious mystery.

In 1521, Alberto de Costello, another Dominican, was the first to use the term "mystery" to refer to the meditations for each decade of the rosary. He attached a mystery to each of the 15 Our Fathers while retaining 150 sub-mysteries for each Hail Mary.

During the 16th century, the 15-decade rosary became quite popular, and in 1470 still another Dominican, Blessed Alan de la Roche, founded the Confraternity of the Psalter of Jesus and Mary, which contributed enormously to the rosary's popularity.

www.stisidore-yubacity.org/rosaryhistory.htm

[whistle]

11. Thank you Dcitizen for that link on the historical development...

...of the Rosary in Catholic life.

[patrice]

12. IMO, that was the historical development of the Rosary . . .

. . . from more of a macro-perspective.

" . . . in Catholic life." would be more about what grassroots rosary pray-ers actually do, i.e. what their Rosary behaviors actually are, not what someone else says they mean/are.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

13. The prayer I like best

from the Rosary is the one that says, in part,
Oh my Jesus, lead all souls to heaven....especially those who are in most need of Thy Mercy.

Maybe because this echoes er-Rahman (Mercy) and er-Rahim (Compassion), words that are oft used to describe the One....and remember that Jesus is also called Ruh Allah (Breath of God).

[ElsewheresDaughter]

14. the Rosary is Holy Scripture quoted Luke 1:27

the Rosary is Scripture

1:27. To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David: and the virgin's name was Mary.

1:28. And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

1:29. Who having heard, was troubled at his saying and thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be.

1:30. And the angel said to her: Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God.

1:31. Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb and shalt bring forth a son: and thou shalt call his name Jesus.

1:32. He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father: and he shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever.

1:33. And of his kingdom there shall be no end.

[Dcitizen]

15. Excellent, it's the Annunciation on March 25.

That's the words of the Archangel Gabriel coming to Mother Mary to announce that she will bear the Son of God and that God's divine nature will be united with human nature in the person of Jesus Christ. The angel also foretold her that her cousin Elizabeth will bear a baby who turns out to be John the Baptist.