Bugnini Wanted to “Update” the Rosary—But Paul VI Wouldn’t Let Him

Plus: why the Rosary is so beloved — and why no pope could ever licitly ban it

The photo in the center is by Fr Lawrence Lew OP (source)

On this feast of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary, let’s begin by asking, Why is the Rosary such a beloved form of prayer?

It seems to me that Catholics who are accustomed to praying it love it not simply because Our Lady asked us to pray it (though perhaps that might be the reason we started, or the reason we do it even when we might not feel like it on a given day), but because there is something helpful, comforting, and strengthening in the form of the prayer itself. It is well designed to place us in God’s presence, to still the mind, to concentrate our petitions on the essentials, to make us linger with Our Lady and Our Lord in the mysteries of life, death, and glorification.

Fr. Bryan Houghton speaks to this point in his autobiography Unwanted Priest, in the chapter “Prayer, Grace, and the Liturgy.” Having explained the meaning of what he calls “the traditional view of prayer,” namely, adherence to grace in recollection leading to adoration, he goes on to say:

Neither must it be imagined that such a view of prayer may be descriptive of high contemplatives in the unitive way but cannot be applied to the simple faithful. This is not true. All the forms of prayer peculiar to and encouraged by the Church imply and require a state of recollection and adherence, not of meaningful commitment and activity. The Rosary, the Litanies, the Stations, the Divine Praises, the indulgenced ejaculations, who has ever thought of the words spoken or even of the particular mystery? In what possible way are such repetitions meaningful? Their use is to reduce the activity of the human mind to a minimum in order to liberate the soul for adherence to God in prayer.

I like the fact that he downplays to some extent the use of the imagination in meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary. It’s true that we may use our imagination in an Ignatian manner to place ourselves, as it were, into the scene of the Annunciation or Visitation or Nativity, etc., but it is also entirely acceptable to have the mystery present as a mystery and not as an imaginary scene — to dwell in the presence of the Archangel Gabriel and the Blessed Virgin, more like gazing upon an icon and letting its message penetrate the heart. What matters here is not a staged representation but personal presence with perhaps the aid of some particular saturated symbol or symbols, or a word from Scripture, or an aura of truth that surrounds the mystery — e.g., venerating the life-giving cross, or adoring the wounds of the Savior, while meditating on the fifth Sorrowful Mystery.

An old Dominican once said to me as a young man, “I don’t do much with my head when I’m praying the Rosary; I just enter into the presence of Jesus and Mary, and let them work on my heart.” I was a little shocked at the time, since the only thing I’d ever heard is that you’re supposed to “meditate on the mysteries,” and I simply assumed this meant Ignatian “composition of place”: you had to reconstruct in your head the narrative of the event, sort of like sketching out a screenplay.

Later, after decades of time praying the decades of beads, I understand what the friar was talking about. At home, we light several candles in front of icons of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, St. Michael, St. Benedict, and St. Thérèse, and we pray our beads. Sometimes I think of a scene, but most of the time I simply want to “soak in” whatever the mystery is: I hail the Virgin with St. Gabriel, and call her full of grace; I beg for the glory of the resurrection; I marvel at the crowned Lady. And sometimes, when tired, or suffering, or distracted, I can’t even manage that much — but the cascading prayers, always the same, calm the mind, replenish the heart, and push away, for a short time, the cares of life.

Once you have this experience, and join to it the experience of Low Mass, you recognize without much difficulty why the two often went together. It wasn’t that the faithful “couldn’t access the Mass.” Certainly for the last century and more, they could easily use a missal if they wanted to; my shelves are bursting with devotional books of every shape and size from the preconciliar period, often well-worn, which contained the Order of Mass and some of the main Gospels, if not more. No; it was rather that the silent adoration encouraged by the Low Mass fit hand-in-glove with the quiet lingering among the mysteries of the Lord and His Mother that the Rosary follows. They are both the kind of prayer Fr. Houghton described above. At the center of the Rosary is Jesus — just as in the Mass.