In the current Catholic Church, the Blessed Rosary plays an important part in public devotion/piety. But I also notice that the current Pope is a devout and devoted Marian. He even has a large “M” on his papal coat of arms, which, I suppose, stands for “Maria.”
Although the Rosary was intrduced into Catholicism a long time ago, has the Rosary been such an integral part of the Catholic Church for a long time or is this a relatively new phenomenon? How much has the currently-reigning Pope influenced this movement for better or for worse? What about the events/messages of the apparition of Mary at Fatima?
WRS
The Rosary has been significant for well over a thousand years. Francis and Dominic in the 12th Century encouraged its use.
As you probably know, WRS, but is worth explaining to others who may not: It’s used as an aid to meditation, in which the conscious mind focuses on twenty Mysteries of the Faith, in order, while the stuff that would normally interfere with that prayer, thinking about what to cook for dinner, whether one is going to get laid tonight, etc., is devoted to an intentional-but-rote repetition of standard, well-known prayers. The purpose of this is to be able to focus the whole self to prayer, body telling beads, unconscious mind at work on rote prayer, and conscious mind dedicated to understanding the Mysteries of the Faith better.
However, (B) its use is not prescribed for anyone, except perhaps members of certain religious orders. It’s a purely voluntary act of piety, not a requirement placed on any Catholic as a matter of canon law.
“Telling” the Rosary was a very common practice among the Catholic women of my acquaintance when I was growing up in the 50s and early 60s; it slacked off with Vatican II reforms, but has been re-encouraged. I understand that it was a fairly common devotion during much of medieval and modern Catholicism, though someone with a much better grasp of Catholic piety through history than I would have to speak more on that.
I often pray the Rosary and it’s recited before mass at my church before mass on Sundays. I’m not particularly knowledgeable about its history though.
The Pope’s devotion to the Rosary is quite well known. In fact he has made one of the most significant changes to the Rosary in the last couple of hundred years by adding another set of mysteries - the five *luminous * mysteries, to complement the existing sorrowful, *joyful * and *glorious * mysteries.
The Rosary’s attribution to Dominic is very iffy-- it’s traditional but highly unlikely. There is, though, possibly some connection with a certain Dominic of Prussia who died in 1460s-- I guess this gets conflated with Dominic-Dominic at some point in the popular imagination; another likely suspect is Adolf of Essen, D. 1439 (both Carthusians, not Dominicans-- I think the Dominicans become interested in it later).
In the '70s a couple of older texts from around 1300 were discovered that are likely related in some way to the later real rosary texts-- some similarities (one of them from the early 14th-c even uses the terms Roesenkranze and Roezen-krenzelin or somesuch). Also people were counting “chaplets” of hail Marys in the 12th century, but not doing the Rosary devotion proper, yet. Origins are hazy. But, yeah, the texts that we really call the rosary (as we now know it) show up in the fifteenth century. It’s possible that it appeared first in German vernacular and then made its way into Latin.
(however, systematic prayer cycles to Jesus and/or Mary in general show up before these dates-- the Rosary is one of many and not one of the older ones)
Rosary devotion gets very big in the later 15th century when some confraternities form around it and it gets a fat indulgence. At that time it became exceedingly popular.
[The use of beads to count prayers is a bit older than these prayers and was also found in Islamic and Buddhist areas (just in case we are asking about the physical object Rosary).]
I suspect that, while the use of the Rosary is quite old, the current mystique of the Rosary, with the Five Sorrowful Mysteries, the Five Joyful Mysteries, etc., is quite recent. (For those of you who aren’t Catholic, there are specific prayers to be said while holding each of the beads of the Rosary, most of them "Hail Mary"s. There are five sets of ten beads on the round part of the Rosary, each of which is associated with an event in the life of Christ, and each of which is called a “Mystery”) I don’t have any documentation or cites to back this up, but it has the feel of something that’s not much more than 100 years old.
In our Church we had a stained glass window of St. Dominic Receiving the Rosary from the Blessed Virgin Mary. I never heard exactly which Dominic, or when he lived, or what the circumstances were.
Whenm I was an altar boy in the 1960s, about the only people who came to the 6 AM weekday Masses were old women who sat way in the back of the Church. They didn’t seem to pay much attention to the Priest or the doings at the altar – they just knelt there and prayed with their rosaries. To them, it seemed as if all that was important was being at the Mass. The rosary was the real devotion.
as noted above, Rosaries could be an aid to meditation. I suspect that it is very different things to others. To some, repetitive prayers allow the brain to kick into automatic mode and induce a trance-like state. To others, saying the rosary is an easy-to-learn method of praying that doesn’t require much thought or brainpower. To a grammar-school kid, it’s frequently a boring ritual that the nuns force you into. But I wouldn’t presume to judge anyone’s reason or method of praying the rosary.