The Story of the Family Rosary

This is a new story - the loveliest story that we know of - the story of the Family Rosary. It begins in a little house at Nazareth: there, at the message of an Angel, Our Lady conceived her Divine Son and began to live the beautiful truths of the Family Rosary - the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. For centuries men and women who were true Christians lived by these eternal truths. But a time came in the thirteenth century when men forgot them. Christian civilization seemed to be dying out. All kinds of disorders had sprung up among peoples and nations. Anti-Christian doctrines were openly offered as spiritual food for God's children. Then it was that God raised up one of His great saints, Dominic, a learned scholar and devoted child of Mary. There seemed to be no hope of saving a sin-oppressed world. Dominic did not lose courage. He had a Mother who would not fail him. With all the fervor of his soul he called upon her. Then, according to tradition, the lovely Queen of Heaven and Earth appeared to him holding a Rosary in her hand, taught him how to pray it, and instructed him to preach it to the world. These are her words telling the secret of its power: Introduce the Rosary devotion everywhere; teach it to the people and tell them that this devotion is most pleasing to my Divine Son as well as to me. By means of the Rosary devotion, virtue will flourish, vice will be destroyed, heresy will perish, and Divine graces will be obtained. The Rosary will be an inexhaustible fountain of every kind of blessing. I promise you that I will prove by many graces how pleasing this devotion is to me and how profitable to the faithful." This was what Dominic had been waiting for. He did introduce the Rosary to the people, as his Lady asked, but more than that, he made it his life's work. The people must have been waiting for it, too, for they took it from the churches to their homes. It became the prayer that conquered vice, caused virtue to flourish, and brought Divine graces and blessings to everyone.