Why Do Catholics Pray the Rosary?

The Rosary is actually a series of prayers rooted in Scripture. The main prayer, which is prayed about 150 times in a full rosary, is the Hail Mary. It starts with the words of the angel Gabriel to Mary in Luke 1:28 (“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you”) and continues with Elizabeth’s greeting to her in Luke 1:42 (“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb”). Catholics then say: “Holy Mary,” which follows logically from her being “full of grace” and now in heaven, and “Mother of God,” which is a phrase approved at the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD as a response to those who denied Jesus’s divine nature. The prayer ends with: “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” (See Why Do Catholics Pray to Mary? for more on this.) The other prayers in the Rosary, primarily the Our Father and the Glory Be (Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.), are also Biblical and rooted in Jesus’s teachings about God’s identity and how to pray.

Reciting those scriptural prayers forms the foundation of the Rosary, but just as important to the Rosary is the meditation on the major events of Jesus’s life and ministry. The full Rosary is divided into 15 ‘decades,’ each composed of 1 Our Father, 10 Hail Mary’s, and 1 Glory Be. During each decade, Catholics meditate on a different aspect of Jesus’s life, called a ‘mystery.’ The mysteries focus on events such as Jesus’s birth, His Passion, and of course, His Resurrection. Similar to stained glass windows, which were created as an opportunity to explain Bible stories to those who couldn’t read, the Rosary offers an opportunity to reflect on these stories and what they mean for us.

But why is the Hail Mary repeated so many times? The Rosary began as a way for lay people in the Middle Ages to pray along with the monks and nuns who prayed all 150 psalms each day - those outside monasteries didn’t have time to pray the psalms all day long, but they could pray 150 Hail Mary’s while thinking about Jesus’s life. Actually, repetitive prayer has been a part of the Church’s history since the beginning – just three hundred years after Jesus’s death, monks were already repeating all of the Psalms daily, and even Jesus would have repeated the Shema each day of His life - and in Mt. 26:44 and Mk. 14:39, we actually see Christ repeating prayers. Christ’s statement condemning ‘vain repetition’ doesn’t apply here, because not all repetition is vain - clearly, or else Christ Himself wouldn’t have given us a prayer to repeat (the Our Father) two verses after that condemnation! What Jesus was referring to was specifically the way that pagans used to babble repeated prayers to their gods that they believed to be magical. Earnestly repeating a heartfelt prayer to the true God is anything but vain repetition!