[Prayer]
Dear Fr Donagh,
My wife and I have been saying the rosary nearly every night since we were married. We brought up the children to take their turn giving out the decades. They weren’t always happy about it but they did it. Of course toward the end they were very good at finding excuses to miss the rosary altogether. Anyway they always knew that they should say their prayers. Our daughter in law is the best ever. She says the rosary with us every night but our son never turns up. She’s introducing new things into it though, bits from the bible, and pauses for silence. I suppose it’s a bit of Vatican two, changing everything. Is it right though? I’d like to know what you think. Liam
Dear Liam,
Your daughter-in-law is the next generation, so you can expect a bit of disturbance: that's what the next generation does. They are sent to stir the pot. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing to stir up some of those ingredients that may have settled to the bottom.
Even the Mass and the Sacraments can change appearance sometimes: as when they went into English in the 1960s. That was a strange experience, and it was a bit sloppy at the beginning because it was as new to the priests as it was to the people. But it’s the same Mass. We were attached to the routine of it, the external appearances, and the changes forced us to look at the essential, to look at what the Scriptures called the “once-for-all offering” of himself that Jesus made (Hebrews 7:27). That remains forever unchanged, but it could become less visible to us if we insist on the external form remaining forever unchanged. It is the same with every prayer-form we have, including the Rosary. Pope John Paul II added a new section to the Rosary in 2002: the Luminous mysteries, or the Mysteries of Light.
What your daughter-in-law is doing sounds thoughtful and alive. A prayer-form is a kind of vehicle that carries our spirit to God, but the essence of the thing is the prayer ‘inside’ the form. You know this well, but if your daughter-in-law’s trimmings serve as reminders, that is surely good. Our mothers, as you remember, were forever adding trimmings to the Rosary, sometimes longer than the Rosary itself.
There was a Question and Answer on the Rosary on this website in 2024. It is still there. You can go back and see if anything there is helpful to you.
Donagh