New edition of The Rosary: Great Weapon of the Twenty First Century

As a follow-up to the Rosary campaign of last year, we have begun to distribute a flyer promoting a new edition of The Rosary: Great Weapon of the Twenty First Century throughout Ireland. Already 65,000 copies of the flyer have been distributed, generating lively interest.

By the end of the year, we hope to have reached our target of 875,000 of these flyers, as well as 50,000 rosary and booklet sets.

Please pray for this campaign. Especially pray the Rosary every day. And if you would be able to help with the distribution of the Rosary booklet and rosaries, or flyers about the Rosary, please do get in touch.

Your best ideas for promoting the Rosary

We recently asked you for your best ideas for promoting the Rosary. Due to limitations of space, we are only able to publish a summarised selection from the numerous responses received:

• Show the benefits of praying the Rosary. We only need to study the 15 promises of Our Lady, to see that the benefits are many. It helps us to prepare for and face death. Salvation and Heaven are promised to those who pray the Rosary faithfully. It shows the love of Jesus and Mary for us.
• Peace is also promised to the world.
• Let people know that, thanks to the devotion to the Holy Rosary, the Faith remained strong in Ireland throughout centuries of persecution.
• Tell striking stories about the Rosary. Use the exact words of Our Lady.
• Give testimonies of how praying the Rosary has helped us or others.
• St. Alphonsus Ligori had the idea of getting people to pray 3 Hail Marys, which would get them accustomed to praying at the same time that it would attract graces from Heaven.
• Another way to achieve the same thing could be to pray one decade per day, or to pray the Rosary every day for a month – the month of May for example. On realising the benefits, people would hopefully continue to pray the Rosary.
• Encourage the Rosary in schools, and after Mass.
• Continue the Ireland Needs Fatima campaign – ask everyone to pray an extra decade for the campaign each day.

We are grateful to all our readers who made suggestions for improving our promotion of the Holy Rosary.

Forgotten Truths

The Best of Prayers

By Pope Leo XIII
In Mary, God has given us the most zealous guardian of Christian unity. There are, of course, more ways than one to win her protection by prayer, but as for Us, We think that the best and most effective way to her favour lies in the Rosary.

…When such faith is exercised by vocally repeating the Our Father and Hail Mary of the Rosary prayers, or better still in the contemplation of the mysteries, it is evident how close we are brought to Mary. For every time we devoutly say the Rosary in supplication before her, we are once more brought face to face with the marvel of our salvation; we watch the mysteries of our Redemption as though they were unfolding before our eyes; and as one follows another, Mary stands revealed at once as God´ s Mother and our Mother.

…Meditation on the mysteries of the Rosary, often repeated in the spirit of faith, cannot help but please her and move her, the fondest of mothers, to show mercy to her children.

For that reason We say that the Rosary is by far the best prayer by which to plead before her the cause of our separated brethren. To grant a favourable hearing belongs properly to her office of spiritual Mother. For Mary has not brought forth – nor could she – those who are of Christ except in the one same Faith and in the one same love; for “Can Christ be divided?”

(Encyclical Adiutricem, September 9, 1895)

Ireland Needs Fatima Campaign Update

They Tied His Hands Because He Did Good

By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

Why was Our Lord bound by his executioners?

Thy hands, Lord, what had they done? Why were they tied? Who can say, Lord, what glory these hands gave to God, when they first received the kisses of Our Lady and Saint Joseph? Who can tell the tenderness with which Mary Most Holy made that first caress?

With what piety they joined for the first time in prayer? And with what strength, nobility and humility they worked in Saint Joseph’s shop?

These hands which were so gentle for upright men like Saint Joseph, the innocent, and Mary Magdalen, the penitent; these hands which were so terrible against the world, the flesh and the devil – why are they tied down and reduced to raw flesh?

Why so much hatred and so much fear that it seemed necessary to tie Thy hands, Lord?

Is it because someone is afraid of being cured? Or caressed? Who among us fears health? Who hates tenderness? Lord, to comprehend this monstrosity, one must believe in evil. It is necessary to recognize that men have this tendency, that they may be such, that their nature easily revolts against sacrifice and that, when they enter the way of revolt, there is no infamy or disorder of which they are not capable.

M Jesus, when someone says no to Thee, they begin to hate Thee, hating all good, all truth, and all perfection of which Thou art the personification. And if they do not have Thee at hand in a visible form, they strike the Church, profane the Eucharist, blaspheme, spread immorality and preach revolt and rebellion.

Thou art bound, my Jesus, and where are the lame, the paralytics, the blind, and the mutes whom Thou didst cure? The dead whom Thou didst resurrect, the possessed whom Thou didst free, the sinners whom Thou didst lift up, and the just to whom Thou didst reveal eternal life?

Why don’t they come to break the loops which bind Thy hands, Lord? Why?

(Crusade for a Christian Civilization, March-April 1977, page 1)

Sorrow

By Charles Marie George Huysmans
To attempt to understand the reason for the existence of sorrow, of this appalling Benefactress, one must go back to man’s beginnings, to Eden, where Sorrow was born the moment Adam became conscious of sin. She was the first-born of Man’s work and ever since, she has pursued him upon earth and beyond the tomb, even to the very threshold of Paradise.

She was the atoning daughter of Disobedience; though Baptism wipes out the original stain, Sorrow it is unable to check; to the water of the Sacrament she adds the water of tears; she cleanses souls, as best she can, with two substances borrowed from man’s own body, water and blood.

Hateful, and hated by all, she penalised generation after generation; from father to son antiquity handed down hatred and fear of this torturer; paganism, unable to understand her, made of her an evil goddess whom prayers and gifts failed to appease.

For centuries she bore the burden of humanity’s curse, and, weary of seeing her work of reparation provoking only wrath and abuse, she too, impatiently awaited the coming of the Messiah who should clear her reputation and remove the hateful stigma that was hers.

She awaited Him as her Redeemer and also as her Betrothed, destined for her since the Fall; and for Him, accordingly, she reserved her passion, until then kept within bounds. For, from the time since her mission began, the tortures she had dealt out were comparatively tolerable. She had to curtail her grievous caresses to suit the proportions of mankind. She did not give free play to herself when dealing with those despairing ones who repulsed and reviled her, when they but felt her hovering near.

Only on the God-Man did she lavish all that was most exquisite in her armoury. His capacity for suffering exceeded all that she had known. She crept towards Him on that awful night, when alone, forsaken in a garden, He took upon Himself the sins of the world, and, having embraced Him, she gained a grandeur that was never hers till then. So terrible was she that at her touch He swooned. His Agony was His Betrothal to her.

She filled His cup with the sole blandishments that were hers to offer-atrocious and superhuman torments; and as a faithful spouse she devoted herself to Him and never left Him again till the end.

Mary, and Magdalene, and the holy women, were not able to follow Him everywhere, but she accompanied Him to the Praetorium, to Herod, to Pilate; she counted up the thongs of the whips, she made sure that the thorns were prickly, that the gall was bitter, that the lance and the nails were sharp.

But, when the supreme moment had come, when Mary and Magdalene and St. John stood weeping at the foot of the Cross, and Christ gave up the ghost, and the Church came forth in floods of blood and water from the Heart of the Victim, that was the end.

Christ, unmoved, escaped for ever from the embrace of Sorrow, but Sorrow was rehabilitated, redeemed, cleared forever by His death.

As much decried as had been the Messiah, in Him she was raised. Her mission was ratified and ennobled, and, henceforth, she was comprehensible to Christians; until the end of time she was to be loved by souls appealing to her for help in the expiation of sin, and loved, too, in memory of the Passion of Christ.

Biographical Note
Charles Marie George Huysmans was a renowned French novelist, born in 1847. He was baptised a Catholic, but led a sinful life in his youth, consequently losing his Faith. In later years, he underwent a complete conversion and entered a Benedictine monastery where he persevered until his death in 1907.

The above text is taken from his novel, The Oblate of Saint Benedict.

It is a synopsis of his own life and spiritual struggles. In coming to grips with the great problem of human suffering, his masterful pen leaves us, in the text above, one of the most beautiful pages on the subject.

Ambeinces, Customs and Civilisations

“Non in Commotione Dominus”

(3 Kings 19:11 )

By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

It is night. Imagine  the complete  stillness that inhabits  the darkness captured  by this photograph.  The soul feels invited  to reflection in such an  atmosphere. The circumstances  of daily  life – great or small,  pleasant, tiresome, or even painful  – all disappear. Alone, by himself, man can overcome all  these and enter into the superior realm of recollection, reflection, and study.

It is an austere and calm happiness.  Quite simply, it is a true happiness.

This happiness is vividly apparent  in this picture. Three  lights glow in the picture. The  least important of them is the one  that properly merits the name  “light,” the candlelight. Its reflection  on the book is the picture’s  second glowing light,  creating the impression that the  thoughts in the text have become  luminous.

The candlelight and its reflection on the book illuminate the  face, and thus we see the third and most authentic light, that of  an attentive and astute soul engaged in reading. Analyzing this face, we see that it is calm, absorbed, and happy.

It is, as we said, the happiness of isolation and recollection, the happiness of thinking.

*****

Our forefathers were avid for this kind of happiness, but those who appreciate it today are becoming increasingly rare.

On the contrary, the number  of those who find pleasure only  in noise, agitation, and exhilarating  sensations is growing.

In New York, in the neighbourhood of Harlem, some agitated sports fans just learned of he victory of their champion. Among all nationalities, ethnic groups, and races – among everyone today – the general tendency is to think that this is happiness.

*****

Those who know the pleasure  of recollection are in possession  of a precious prerequisite for  sanctification. “O beata solitude, o sola beatitude!” (O blessed solitude, o sole blessing!) said Saint Bernard. But for those who live amidst perpetual turmoil and who neither know nor want to live apart from it, so much racket drowns out the voice of grace.

“Non in commotione Dominus – God is not found in agitation” (3 Kings 19:11).

(Originally published in Catolicismo, no. 114.  Republished in Crusade, Mar.-April 2001.)

Our Readers Write

• “I’m delighted to read about the SummerCamp – the first of many, please God”.
  MC, Co. Galway
• “I consider the Rosary Book most helpful for keeping the mind focussed on the mystery for meditation”.
  MR, Co. Cavan
• “I was feeling very down this morning but when your calendar arrived it really gave me a lift. I was almost in tears it was so beautiful”.
  SM, Co. Louth
• “Thank you very much for the beautiful calendar. It is like a little bit of Heaven”.
  PD, Co. Louth
• “This calendar is a beautiful Christmas gift. It will bring peace and joy to all who receive it”.
  BF, Co. Wexford
• “It must have taken a long time to put those photos and verses together to make the Calendar. It is wonderful and very inspiring, and will help a lot of people to pray”.
  KC, Co Waterford
• “I received your booklet on the Rosary. I am really overwhelmed by its contents, and would like to obtain copies to distribute”.
  ES, Co Dublin

Obituary Please remember in your prayers Ernesto Pascual Burini (1943 –2007), who died peacefully on 23rd December, 2007. He was a director of Irish Society for Christian Civilisation since its beginning in 2004, and was instrumental in setting up the association and in all our campaigns until his death. For over 40 years his dedication to the Catholic Church and to Christian Civilisation was an inspiration to all who knew him, and provided a tremendous well of experience from which our association was able to draw.We are ever grateful for his help. He was also active in helping and encouraging apostolic works in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Poland and Lithuania, as well as in his native Argentina. Eternal Rest grant to him, O Lord, and may Perpetual Light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen.

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