19th Sunday after Pentecost
External Solemnity of the Holy Rosary
With the month of October, we find ourselves once again in what is at once the month of the Holy Rosary and the month of the Holy Angels. This is certainly no coincidence. Our Blessed Lady and the Holy Angels have, what we might call a certain holy connivence in that together they seek by every means to withdraw us from a life lived in and for the flesh and lift us up to life in the spirit, for God and with God.
Our Lady is, as Wordsworth wrote so poignantly: ‘our tainted nature’s solitary boast’, the one among all humans whose angelic purity is untainted, and therefore the one closest to the Holy Angels. But the Angels recognise in her their better, for it was she, not an Angel, who was chosen to be the Mother of God. We see this in the reverence with which the Archangel Gabriel greets Our Lady on the day of the Annunciation as the Gospel of this Mass reminds us. He approaches her with the deepest respect, and gives her a theretofore unheard-of title: Full of Grace, full with a plenitude that surpasses even that of the Angels, full of God, as no other creature ever has been or ever will be.
All through the mysteries of the Holy Rosary, we contemplate the mysteries of the Word Incarnate through the eyes of Mary, but if we are attentive, we can also do so through the eyes of the Holy Angels. Their presence is explicitly evoked in several of them. We already mentioned the Annunciation. While the Gospel does not mention their presence at the Visitation, a magnificent fresco in Ain Karim shows Mary en route to Elizabeth, accompanied by a group of Angels adoring in her womb the newly Incarnate Son of God. This is more than pious imagination, for it captures the very essence of what must have been the first concern of the Angels when God walked our earth: to adore the divine humility which moves Him to appear, although He is the Creator of the universe, in such lowly estate. At the Nativity, the Angels announce the birth to the shepherds and sing the glory of the Most High, giving us the first words of the angelic hymn Gloria in excelsis Deo, that we recite frequently at Holy Mass.
At the Agony in the Garden, an angel comes to comfort our Blessed Lord. God in the flesh accepts the comfort of one of His creatures in His moment of anguish. You may have seen paintings of the Angels weeping during those dark hours during which it seemed that Hell had conquered God Himself, as He was flogged as a common criminal and crowned as a mock king. There is no doubt that the entire host of Angels would have helped Our Lord carry His cross if He allowed it. As the Divine Victim hangs from the cross, the Angels gather the drops of blood flowing from His sacred hands and distribute them to souls.
In the glorious mysteries, the angels are centre stage: one of them rolls back the stone of the sepulchre, while others announce the resurrection of the Lord. In the Ascension, they accompany the Lord as He enters His glory, and two of them announce to the apostles His return at the end of time. While they are not explicitly mentioned at the descent of the Holy Ghost, they are frequent actors in the evangelisation that follows: an Angel delivers Peter from prison, while another Angel appears to the Roman centurion Cornelius and inspires him to go to Peter to receive the faith, thus inaugurating the evangelisation of the Gentiles. With the Assumption and the Coronation of our Lady, they constitute her escort and guard of honour.
Once we have said all this, we really do not need to explain further why the Rosary is, along with the Holy Mass, the most typical of all Catholic prayers. The whole purpose of God becoming man was to lead us to Heaven. The mysteries of His life have no other objective. They are not only for our edification and consolation, but rather they spur us on to walk in the footsteps of the God-Man. By doing so, the faithful soul is gradually deified, made to be like God. In this extraordinary, supernatural endeavour, we need constant support and encouragement. The Rosary gives us that by helping us rise above the natural tendencies of humanity, which are to be taken up with earthly things, and to rise to the spiritual, the heavenly.
The Rosary is one of the greatest antidotes against temptation. What happens when we are faced with a temptation to sin? The choice we face is essentially this: do I choose the passing dust of this lowly world and a momentary amusement or profit by which I would lose God’s grace in my soul; or do I choose to rise above it, to aspire to be a truly holy person, one in whom God is pleased to dwell, one whom God makes like to Himself, one who will one day behold God face to face with the choirs of Angels?
Clearly we cannot make the right choice in a consistent manner on our own. And that is why the Rosary is there. If we recite it faithfully every day, if we recite especially in difficult times, if we let the sweet rhythm of the Hail Marys gently lead us to the contemplation of the divine mysteries, holding us peacefully in God’s presence as a babe is held in its mother’s arms, we learn there how to avoid sin and live our lives in the light of God, how to please God, how to love and help neighbour, putting the needs of others before our own.
In the offertory verse of this 19th Sunday after Pentecost, we pray with Psalm 137: Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou dost preserve my life; thou dost stretch out thy hand against the wrath of my enemies, and thy right hand delivers me. In the midst of trouble we are, from our entrance into this world till our exit on the day of our death. But God stretches out His hand in the most perfect way by living among us and showing us the path to Heaven. This is the path that the Holy Rosary contemplates day by day. As we persevere in prayer, with Mary the Mother of Jesus, we find ourselves taken up in a story that surpasses us, that leads us beyond the petty interests of a mundane existence, a story in which we too have a role to play, a role that only we can play, and if we do not play, it will remain forever unplayed.
The more we pray, the more Our Lady and the Angels get involved in our lives, and the less Satan has any opening to tempt us. It is by human actions that grace is poured out upon the world, and the most important and salvific of human actions are prayers which, under the inspiration of grace, we throw up to Heaven as so many arrows of loving supplication, as we pause the hustle and bustle to invoke the very power of God which is mediated to us by the one Blessed Fulton Sheen loved to call the ‘lovely Lady dressed in blue’ and by her servants, the Holy Angels.