Hail! Full of Grace, Simple Thoughts on the Rosary

HAIL! FULL OF GRACE, SIMPLE THOUGHTS ON THE ROSARY

..................

Mother Mary Loyola

LACONIA PUBLISHERS

Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this book, please leave a review or connect with the author.

All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

Copyright © 2016 by Mother Mary Loyola

Interior design by Pronoun

Distribution by Pronoun

TABLE OF CONTENTS

HAIL! FULL OF GRACE

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

I.—THE JOYFUL MYSTERIES

THE ANNUNCIATION

I.—The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.—John i.

II.—The Lord of all things hath loved her.—Wisd. vii.

III.—While all things were in quiet silence and the night was in the midst of her course Thy Almighty Word leapt down from Heaven.—Wisd. xviii.

IV.—The Angel Gabriel was sent from God to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, and the virgin’s name was Mary.—Luke i.

V.—The Most High hath sanctified his own tabernacle.—Ps. xlv.

VI.—My heart delighted in her.—Ecclus. li.

THE VISITATION

I.—Whithersoever she entereth God will give a blessing.—Ecclus. iv.

II.—Mary went with haste into the hill country.—Luke i.

III.—Her conversation hath no bitterness, nor her company any tediousness, but joy and gladness.—Wisd. viii.

IV.—In her is the spirit of understanding, holy, active, sweet.—Wisd. vii.

V.—Charity is kind—I. Cor. xiii.

THE NATIVITY

I.—This is God, our God, unto eternity, and for ever and ever.—Ps. xlvii.

II.—How hath He not with Him given us all things?—Rom viii.

III.—There was no room in the inn.—Luke ii.

IV.—And the shepherds said one to another: Let us go over to Bethlehem, and let us see this word that is come to pass.—Luke ii.

V.—She brought forth her first-born Son, and wrapped Him up in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger.—Luke ii.

VI.—My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways My ways.—Isaias lv.

VII.—Who is this?—Isaias lxiii.

VIII.—Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart.—Luke ii.

IX.—Fear not: Behold your God.—Isaias xl.

THE PRESENTATION

I.—Blessed art Thou in the holy Temple of Thy glory.—Dan. iii.

II.—Bless the Lord all ye servants of the Lord, who stand in the house of the Lord, in the courts of the house of our God.—Ps. cxxxiii.

III.—Now Thou dost dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, according to Thy word in peace.—Luke ii.

IV.—And on the fortieth day they carried Him to the Temple to present Him to the Lord.—Luke ii.

V.—He had received an answer from the Holy Ghost that he should not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord.—Luke ii.

THE FINDING IN THE TEMPLE

I.—I found Him whom my soul loveth: I held Him and I will not let Him go.—Cant. iii.

II.—In the streets and the broad ways I will seek Him whom my soul loveth; I sought Him and found Him not.—Cant. iii.

III.—Show me Thy face.—Cant. ii.

IV.—Son, why hast Thou done so to us?—Luke ii.

V.—I sought Him and found Him not: I called and He did not answer me.—Cant. v.

II. THE SORROWFUL MYSTERIES

MARY AND THE PASSION

THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN

I.—Behold thou hast taught many, and thou hast strengthened the weary hands. . . . But now the scourge is come upon thee and thou faintest: it hath touched thee and thou art troubled.—Job. iv.

II.—The sorrows of death encompassed Me, and the torrents of iniquity troubled Me.—Ps. xvii.

III.—Thou also art wounded as well as we, Thou art become like unto us.—Isaias xiv.

IV.—My heart is ready.—Ps. lvi.

V.—Like to us in all things.—Heb. iv.

THE SCOURGING AT THE PILLAR

I.—From the sole of the foot unto the top of the head there is no soundness therein: wounds and bruises and swelling sores. Isaias i.

II.—He is our brother and our flesh.—Gen. xxxvii.

III.—The Lord was angry with Me on your account.—Deut. I

IV.—If in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry?—Luke xxiii.

V.—I have given my body to the strikers.—Isaias 1.

VI.—I am become as a man without help.—Ps. lxxxvii.

THE CROWNING WITH THORNS

I.—I looked for one that would grieve together with me, but there was none: and for one that would comfort me, and I found none.—Ps. lxviii.

II.—They are not afraid to spit in my face.—Job xxx.

III.—In what place soever thou shalt be, lord my king, either in death, or in life, there will thy servant be.—2 Kings xv.

IV.—You are bought with a great price.—1 Cor. i.

V.—The Lord hath cast down and hath not spared all that was beautiful.—Lament. ii.

VI.—Art thou a king, hen? I am a king. For this was I born, and for this came I into the world.—John xviii.

THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS

I.—And bearing His own cross He went forth.—John xix.

II.—I have given you an example that as I have done, so you do also.—John xiii.

III.—Come thou also with thy servants. He answered: I will come. So he went with them.—4 Kings vi.

IV.—In all things like as we are, without sin.—Heb. iv.

V.—They laid the cross on him to carry after Jesus.—Luke xxiii.

VI.—In death they were not divided.—2 Kings i.

VII.—Thou also wast with Jesus of Nazareth.—Mark xiv.

VIII.—Christ suffered for us leaving you an example that you should follow His steps.—1 Peter ii.

THE CRUCIFIXION

I.—Jesus Christ who hath loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood.—Apoc. i.

II.—And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to Myself.—John xii.

III.—Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.—Luke xxiii.

IV.—And he said to Jesus: Lord, remember me when Thou shalt come into Thy Kingdom. And Jesus said to him: Amen, I say to thee this day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.—Luke xxiii.

V.—When Jesus therefore had seen His Mother and the disciple standing whom He loved, He saith to His Mother: Woman, behold thy son. After that He saith to the disciple: Behold thy Mother. And from that hour the disciple took her to his own.

VI.—My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? Mark xv.

VII.—I thirst.—John xix.

VIII.—Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.—Luke xxiii.

IX.—Come down from the Cross!—Mark xv.

X.—So he became their Saviour . . . in His love and in His mercy He redeemed them.—Isaias lxiii.

III. THE GLORIOUS MYSTERIES

THE RESURRECTION

I.—This is the day which the Lord hath made: let us be glad and rejoice therein.—Ps. cxvii.

II.—Free among the dead.—Ps. lxxxvii.

III.—Hail! full of grace, the Lord is with thee.—Luke i.

IV.—Jesus saith to her: Mary. She turning, saith to Him: Rabboni.—John xx.

V.—In the evening weeping shall have place, and in the morning gladness.—Ps. xxix.

VI.—When it was late and the disciples were gathered together Jesus came and stood in the midst and said to them: Peace be to you. John xx.

VII.—See My hands and feet, that it is I Myself; handle and see.—Luke xxiv.

VIII.—Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into His glory?—Luke xxiv.

IX.—Christ is risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep.—1 Cor. xv.

THE ASCENSION

I.—Sing ye to God, sing a psalm to His name: make a way for Him who ascendeth upon the west: the Lord is His name.—Ps. lxvii.

II.—Be Thou exalted, O God, above the heavens, and Thy glory above all the earth.—Ps. lvi.

III.—While they looked on He was carried up to heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God.—Acts i, Luke xxiv, Mark xvi.

IV.—I ascend to My Father and to your Father.—John xx.

V.—O clap your hands, all ye nations, shout unto God with the voice of joy.—Ps. xlvi.

VI.—While they looked on He was carried up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.—Acts i.

VII.—If you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth.—Coloss. iii.

VIII.—This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come as you have seen Him going into heaven.—Acts i.

IX.—Who hath brought many children unto glory.—Heb. ii.

THE DESCENT OF THE HOLY GHOST

I.—Thou gavest them Thy good Spirit to teach them.—2 Esdras ix.

II.—If you being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father from heaven give the good Spirit to them that ask Him!—Luke xi.

III.—These were all persevering in prayer.—Acts i.

IV.—Persevering with one mind.—Acts i.

V.—With Mary the Mother of Jesus.—Acts i.

VI.—They were all filled with the Holy Ghost.—Acts ii.

VII.—My Spirit shall be in the midst of you, fear not.—Aggeus ii.

THE ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN.

I—Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one and come! The winter is now past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers have appeared in our land. . . Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come! Cant. ii.

II.—Put off the garments of thy mourning and affliction, and put on the beauty and honour of that everlasting glory which thou hast from God.—Baruch v.

III.—And on the third day she laid away the garments she wore, and put on her glorious apparel. And glittering in royal robes . . . she stood before the king where he sat on his royal throne.—Esther xv.

IV.—Thou shall be called My pleasure in her.—Isaias lxii.

V.—It is good for me to adhere to my God.—Ps. lxxii.

VI.—The souls of the just are in the hand of God and the torment of death shall not touch them.—Wisd. iii.

VII.—May my soul die the death of the just, and my last end be like unto theirs.—Numb, xxiii.

VIII.—God will show His brightness in thee, to every one under heaven.—Baruch v.

THE CORONATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN IN HEAVEN.

I.—And the King arose to meet her, and bowed to her, and sat down upon his throne, and a throne was set for the King’s mother, and she sat on his right hand.—3 Kings ii. And a great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.—Apoc. xii.

II.—They shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty.—Matth. xxiv.

III.—Come, ye blessed of My Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.—Matth. xxv.

IV.—These that are clothed in white robes, who are they, and whence came they?—Apoc. vii.

V.—What I do thou knowest not now but thou shalt know hereafter. John xiii.

VI.—Requiescat in pace.

VII.—Well done, good and faithful servant! Matth. xxv.

IX.—We are the children of Saints and look for that life which God will give to those that never change their faith from Him.—Tobias ii.

HAIL! FULL OF GRACE

..................

SIMPLE THOUGHTS ON THE ROSARY

BY

MOTHER MARY LOYOLA

AUTHOR OF CORAM SANCTISSIMO, CONFESSION AND COMMUNION, ETC., ETC.

EDITED BY

FATHER THURSTON, S.J.

PREFACE

..................

IT WOULD BE HARD TO find a more striking example of the sure instinct with which the Church feels her way to what is most helpful and practical in matters of piety, than the gradual adoption and final acceptance throughout the Catholic world of the devotion of the Rosary. Whatever difference of opinion may exist regarding the historical question of the origin of this form of prayer, there can be no hesitation in proclaiming it to be singularly adapted to the needs and capacities of the great body of the faithful. It is sometimes disparaged as a mechanical form of devotion, akin to the praying wheel of the Buddhists, and there is sufficient semblance of truth in the reproach to make it sound plausible, but the people who use such language can have little acquaintance with the Rosary as it is practised by those who love it and who understand its possibilities. After all, wherever any constant, form of words is employed there is danger that such forms after a while may lose their power to rouse the attention, and may come to be repeated more or less mechanically. Those must. I venture to think, be very exceptional persons, who after long experience of public prayers at night or morning can assure us that the word spoken by the lips never fails to excite the appropriate mental concept. Whether the Our Father be recited once a day or fifty times a day, it is almost equally difficult at any given recitation to follow the complex train of ideas embodied in the sounds which frequent repetition has made so familiar. This is true even for the educated, but it must be much more true in the case of those millions of simple and uninstructed peasant folk, for whose devotional needs it is the Church’s special care to provide. Is it not thon reasonable that she should accept a more or less mechanical recitation as almost inevitable, and that she should do her best to make profit out of this very difficulty? To tell such persons simply to meditate or to frame prayers for themselves is to show little acquaintance with the very limited capacities of the uneducated multitude. If these are to pray in private they must have something definite to do, something at least to measure by, something to count, something to say. Scientists tell us that there must be a nucleus to form the rain drop, that there must be some foreign body upon which the silver held in solution can be precipitated by an electric discharge. The illiterate cannot commit to memory psalms or long prayers, but given a rudimentary apparatus of Hail Marys, which the very dullest can learn and understand, it is a comparatively easy task to graft upon this stock a system of meditations recalling the incidents of Our Lord’s Life. The child or the peasant who would remain vacant-eyed and openmouthed if bidden to make a mental prayer upon the Nativity of Our Lord, becomes an apt learner enough when we fell him to say ten Hail Marys to Our Lady beside the Crib. There is surely no irreverence in using Hail Marys devoutly repeated as in some sense a measure of time. Though the individual words are little marked, it is fully realised that each is a salutation to Mary. We acknowledge the advent of Royalty with the meaningless discharge of cannon duly numbered. We count by three times three the acclamations with which we hail a popular hero. Why should not Gabriel’s salutation be echoed by the faithful on earth, as the Holy, Holy, Holy, is repeated unceasingly before the presence of the Most High by the choirs of Angels in Heaven? After all there is music in the words. They are the bourdon of a melody which each faithful soul, according to the measure of its individual Drifts, improvises for itself in contemplating the scenes of Our Saviour’s Life and Resurrection. And even where the individual effort is very feeble, who shall say that those bare whispered Aves have no appointed place in the chorus of human praise? It must be a most varied harmony which rises heavenwards from a Church which is the Church of the poor as well as of the rich, of the ignorant multitude as well as of the lettered few. There is no more eloquent proof of the Church’s divine origin than that she makes provision for all her children and takes account of their very different needs, regardless of quality or station. Let it be added at once that I must not be understood to imply that the Rosary is a devotion intended only for the uneducated. No one who may make acquaintance with the reflexions which Mother Loyola has provided in this little book will fail to see that the Rosary is a form of prayer in which both imagination and intelligence may be exercised to the full. Moreover, everyday experience tells us that there are few educated persons who have become familiar with this devotion who do not discover a certain nameless sweetness in its simple methods. No one need fear that he is too intellectual to find help and consolation in his Rosary, though perhaps for those who have not learned the practice in their youth some little perseverance may be required before the full possibilities of the exercise are appreciated. Probably not the least part of its charm lies in this, that here, master and servant, parents and children, learned and ignorant, cleric and layman meet, and are conscious that they meet, upon common ground.

I have designedly refrained in these few words of preface from making any comment upon the history of the Rosary. But there is one fact as to which all students of our devotional literature must be agreed, and that is that since the close of the fifteenth century the Dominican Order have made it specially their own and have had more to do than any other religious body with the universal adoption of this admirable form of prayer. It is to the innumerable confraternities of the Rosary established under Dominican auspices that we owe the prevalence of the fifteen mysteries, now so familiar, over all and every other of the many crowns and chaplets which disputed the pre-eminence in the early years of the sixteenth century. Neither can any thoughtful person hesitate to recognise the intrinsic superiority of an arrangement which is at once eminently simple and which contains so much of what is certain and scriptural, and so little of what is mere matter of fancy. No devout Catholic, whether instructed or ignorant, who habitually meditates upon the mysteries of the Rosary as our Holy Father has exhorted us all to do, can fail to acquire a very real familiarity with the most vital of those lessons which our Divine Redeemer came from Heaven to teach mankind by His example. Such a one may not follow by any conscious act the meaning of each recurrent phrase in the quickly repeated Ares, but he will have learned in what sense Our Lady is full of grace, how far she is privileged above her fellows, how blessed is indeed the fruit of her womb, and this perhaps more thoroughly than if his mind had been slavishly attentive to the exact signification of every uttered word.

Finally, it is in the conviction that it would be difficult to meet with more helpful thoughts, or more vivid pictures than Mother Loyola has here provided to aid us in the meditation of the drama of man’s Redemption that I commend the pages which follow to the consideration of all true lovers of Our Lady’s Rosary.

HERBERT THURSTON, S.J.

Neuilly sur Seine, 16th Sept. 1902.

INTRODUCTION

..................

PEOPLE ARE COMING TO UNDERSTAND as they never understood before how much can be learned by the simple act of sight. The eye is an apt scholar, and not only takes in readily, but retains faithfully. Hitherto, however, it has been lazy, or, at any rate, it has not done its fair share of work. Hence a general determination that it shall make up now for lost time. Pictures are multiplied on every side. Our primers and our prayer-books swarm with them. Our magazines are coming to be in great part illustration. Our advertisements are often a picture and a word. In the lecture room the magic lantern is in constant requisition. So thoroughly, indeed, has every one waked up to the fact that a great means of education has been neglected in the past, that there is a danger of our suffering from its excessive use in the future.

Now, the Church found out the