Today's Rosary | Holy Rosary University

Friends of the Rosary: United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II was a global leader for whom faith was both personal and professional — and that’s remarkable in a world dominated by faithless leaders or lukewarm Christians. We briefly reflect on Elizabeth II’s religious legacy. As head of the royal family, she helped to lead the protestant Church of England and held the title of “Defender of the Faith”...

Friends of the Rosary: Catholic leaders worldwide mourn today the death of the Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms, Elizabeth II at the age of 96 on Thursday, on the feast day of the birth of the Queen of the Universe, the Most Holy Virgin Mary. Elizabeth II was the longest-reigning monarch in British history and the head of the Anglican Church of England, which sep...

Friends of the Rosary: Today, September 8, nine months after the December 8 celebration of the Immaculate Conception, is the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Savior of the world's mother. St. Joachim was deeply grieved, along with his wife St. Anne, by their childlessness. They began to devote themselves to prayer and fasting, wondering whether their inability to conceive a ch...

Friends of the Rosary: At this time of new evangelization , the Enemy is taking advantage and confusing many prelates. A friend is sending us a horrific  video of yoga practitioners inside a Catholic Church in Belgium. Every Wednesday in July and August, at St. James Church in Antwerp in Belgium, yoga classes were offered for its parishioners. The pews of the central nave near the altar...

Friends of the Rosary: An interesting movie, highly recommended, Father Stu , revolves around the idea of the power of suffering. Sorrow and suffering are inevitable parts of human life. We reflect upon it when we pray the Sorrowful Mysteries every Tuesday and Friday. Doctors of the Church taught us that suffering is not only a need for our purification and salvation but also a gift in the Christi...

Friends of the Rosary: We celebrate today the feast of Mother Teresa, a universal, contemporary saint and missionary nun who emphasized God's merciful and preferential love for the poor and forgotten. Born in Skopje, Macedonia, Mother Teresa started working in the slums in India, teaching poor children, and treating the sick in their homes. In 1950, she created the Missionaries of Charity, a congr...

Friends of the Rosary: In today’s Sunday reading ( Lk 14:25-33 ), Jesus Christ encourages us to put Him in the center of our life, radically trusting in Him, beyond anyone else, including our relatives and our own life. He formulates this in a shocking way. Does today’s reading mean that we stop loving our father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters? On the contrary, it means that w...

Friends of the Rosary: Humility is the foundational virtue. The fruit of the first Joyful Mystery of the Incarnation is what defines the saints and the holy people of God.  Jesus Christ, in Matthew 23:12, told us: "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted." To be great, we need to serve, as the Son of God did. He came to serve not to be served... And...

Friends of the Rosary: In today's Sorrowful Mysteries we reflect upon the power of salvific suffering while we walk across a park in Stamford, Connecticut. Our joy comes from the discovery of the meaning of suffering. Saint Paul wrote: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake." The Apostle shared his own discovery and rejoiced in it. Suffering seems to be  essential to the nature of man....

Friends of the Rosary: We pray today's Rosary in Manhattan. In yesterday's reading ( LK 4:38-44 ), we hear Jesus saying to the crowds, "I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God because for this purpose I have been sent." Belonging to the Kingdom of God is what makes our life meaningful. Our faith and our affiliation with Jesus Christ are the essences of our existence. Otherwise, no matt...

Friends of the Rosary: We pray today's Rosary while driving around New York State. We recourse to the Rosary to face many challenges in our personal and collective life. The history of the Rosary shows how this prayer was used at a difficult time due to the spread of heresy or the attacks of the Evil One. As St. John Paul II wrote, "the Rosary is one of the traditional paths o Christian prayer dir...

Friends of the Rosary: At the end of each Rosary, we pray the Memorare . This is a fifteenth-century prayer traditionally attributed to the twelve-century abbot and doctor of the Church, St. Bernard. He was a theologian, poet, and writer, who created the Cistercian reform becoming a model for many monasteries. We celebrated his Memorial Day this August 20th. It’s not a coincidence that we pray the...

Friends of the Rosary: Today is the Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist. On June 24, we celebrate its earthly birthday and today we honor the martyrdom of Christ’s precursor. John the Baptist is the only saint whose birth and death are celebrated. Today’s Gospel relates the circumstances of his execution. He had the courage to blame Herod to his face for the scandal of his illegal unio...

Friends of the Rosary: Today, August 28, God’s Church honors St. Augustine, the fifth-century saint, bishop, author, and philosopher who became an influential mind in the history of salvation. He famously said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” The teachings — well expressed in his autobiographical Confessions and The City of God — were th...

Friends of the Rosary: We celebrate today the memorial of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, while we pray the Rosary driving around Greenwich, Connecticut. St. Monica, a fourth-century saint born in the north of Africa, is a role model for incessant prayers. Through over two decades of prayer and tears, she gave the great Augustine to the Church of God. Also, with patience and prayer, Monic...

Friends of the Rosary: We celebrate today the feast of Our Lady of Czestochowa, also known as the Black Madonna. The icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa was traditionally believed to have been painted by St. Luke the Evangelist on a cypress wood panel from a table used by the Holy Family in Nazareth. The image was discovered by St. Helen, mother of Emperor Constantine, and brought to Czestochowa, Pola...

Friends of the Rosary: On August 25, 2021, Maria Blanca, my wife, entered the hospital for a bone marrow transplant. She had a donor, and we were told that within a month or so she would be back home. The way she said goodbye made us uncomfortable. She accessed a tiny, isolated room for cancer patients, where she installed a little altar to pray. Immediately after, Maria Blanca told us that she wa...

Friends of the Rosary: Today is the Memorial Day of St. Bartholomew, also known as Nathaniel, a doctor in Jewish law, and an Apostle of the Lord. Friend of St. Philip the Apostle, after the Resurrection, St Bartholomew was favored by becoming one of the few apostles who witnessed the apparition of the risen Savior on the sea of Galilee (John 21:2). Later, following the Ascension, he received the g...

Friends of the Rosary: Today is the Memorial Day of St. Rose of Lima, a seventeenth-century saint who inspired by the example of St. Catherine of Siena became a Dominican lay tertiary and had a life heroic in virtue and penance. She devoted herself to works of active charity while living a life of extreme austerity and suffering repeated attacks from the devil. St. Rose of Lima was the first saint...

Friends of the Rosary: Today, we celebrate the Memorial of the Queenship of Mary. This way, we pay devotion to the sovereign Mother of Heaven and Earth. Mary shared the work of the divine Redeemer. From her union with Christ the King, Mary Mother of God stands high above all created things, including angels, archangels, and saints. From the first moment of her conception, the holy Virgin was fille...

Friends of the Rosary: Today's reading ( Lk 13:22-30 ) poses a question that people have been asking forever. "Lord, will only a few people be saved?" Jesus Christ said: "Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough." When asked about specifics, Jesus Christ answered this way. In other passages, the Son of God explained that the...

Friends of the Rosary: As we read today (MT 23:1-12) , at that time, Jesus spoke about the failure of organized religion running Israel: “The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice.” Today, we notice the same problem. It’s not only...

Friends of the Rosary: In today's reading ( MT 22:34-40 ), Jesus Christ reveals what's needed for eternal joy and eternal salvation. He was tested by a scholar this way: "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The seco...

Friends of the Rosary: Yesterday, we reflected upon the great value of silence for our faith, following the message of Our Lady of Knock. The Blessed Virgin Mary remained in silence in this apparition, showing the silence in the face of mystery.  There is certainly a lot of noise in our society. We need silent prayer to understand the mystery of the Lamb of God sacrificed for the salvation of...

Friends of the Rosary: Today, along with the people of Ireland, we celebrate the Memorial of Our Lady of Knock. In 1879, in the village of Knock in County Mayo in the west of Ireland, Our Lady, St. Joseph, St. John the Apostle, a Lamb and a Cross appeared on an altar on the wall of the parish church [image below], and to some villagers. For two hours, a crowd gathered to adore the apparition and t...