How the Rosary Led Me to Christ

As a young child I was very close to God. I spoke to Him in a very natural way and He spoke plainly to me. Although I have very few memories of my early childhood, I vividly remember how close I was to God. When early puberty approached, though, I began to slip away, drifting into the rebellious and angry years of my teens. As the flesh came more alive, my spirit submerged.

The culture of the time didn’t help, either. It was the late 1960s and early 1970s and rebelliousness and the flesh were celebrated as “virtues.” Somehow we thought ourselves more mature than our pathetic forebears, who were hopelessly “repressed.” There was the attitude among the young that we had come of age somehow. We collectively deluded ourselves, aided by the messages of rock music and the haze of drug use, that we were somehow “better.”

So it was the winter of my soul. The vivid faith of my childhood gave way to a kind of indifferent agnosticism. Though I never formally left Church (my mother would never had permitted that as long as I lived in under my parents’ roof), I no longer heard God or spoke to Him. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that when I was in high school I joined the youth choir of my parish church. This was not precipitated by a religious passion, but rather by a passion of another kind: there were pretty girls in the choir and I “sought their company,” shall we say. But God has a way of using beauty to draw us to the truth. Week after week, year after year, as we sang those old religious classics a buried faith began to awaken within me.

But what to do? How to pray? I heard that I was supposed to pray. But how? As a child it had been natural to talk with God. But now He seemed distant, aloof, and likely angry with me. And I’ll admit it, prayer seemed a little “goofy” to me, a high school senior still struggling to be “cool” in his own eyes and in the eyes of his friends. Not only that, but prayer was “boring.” It seemed an unfocused, unstructured, and “goofy” thing.

But I knew someone who did pray. My paternal grandmother, “Nana,” was a real prayer warrior. Every day she took out her beads and sat by the window to pray. I had seen my mother pray now and again, but she was more private about it. But Nana, who lived with us off and on in her last years, knew how to pray and you could see it every day.

Rosary Redivivus – In my parish church of the 1970s, the rosary was non-existent. Devotions and adoration were on the outs during that sterile time. Even the Crucifix was gone. But Nana had that “old-time religion” and I learned to appreciate it through her.

Ad Jesum per Mariam – There are some, non-Catholics especially, who think that talking of Mary or focusing on her in any way takes away from Christ. It is as though they consider it a zero-sum game, in which our hearts cannot love both Mary and Jesus. But my own experience was that Mary led me to Christ. I had struggled to know and worship Christ, but somehow a mother’s love felt more natural, safer, and more accessible to me. So I began there, where I could. Simply pole-vaulting right into a mature faith from where I was did not seem possible. So I began, as a little child again, holding my Mother’s hand. And gently, Mother Mary led me to Christ, her son. Through the rosary, that “Gospel on a string,” I became reacquainted with the basic gospel story.

The thing about Marian devotion is that it opens up a whole world. For with this devotion comes an open door into so many of the other traditions and devotions of the Church: Eucharistic adoration, litanies, traditional Marian hymns, lighting candles, modesty, pious demeanor, and so forth. So as Mary led me, she also reconnected me to many things that I only vaguely remembered. The suburban Catholicism of the 1970s had all but cast these things aside, and I had lost them as well. Now in my late teens, I was going up into the Church “attic” and bringing things down. Thus, little by little, Mother Mary was helping me to put things back in place. I remember my own mother being pleased to discover that I had taken some old religious statues, stashed away in a drawer in my room, and placed them out on my dresser once again. I also took down the crazy rock-and-roll posters, one by one, and replaced them with traditional art, including a picture of Mary.

Over time, praying the Rosary and talking to Mary began to feel natural. And, sure enough, little by little, I began to speak with God. It was when I was in the middle of college that I began to sense the call to the priesthood. I had become the choir director by that time and took a new job in a city parish: you guessed it, “St. Mary’s.” There, the sterility of suburban Catholicism had never taken hold. The candles burned brightly at the side altars. The beautiful windows, marble altars, statues, and traditional novenas were all on display in Mother Mary’s parish. The rest is history. Mary cemented the deal between me and her Son, Jesus. I became His priest and now I can’t stop talking about Him! He is my hero, my savior and Lord. And praying again to God has become more natural and more deeply spiritual for me.

It all began one day when I took Mary’s hand and let her lead me to Christ. And hasn’t that always been her role? She, by God’s grace, brought Christ to us, showed Him to us at Bethlehem, presented Him in the Temple, and ushered in His first miracle (even despite His reluctance). She said to the stewards that day at Cana, and to us now, “Do whatever he tells you.” The Gospel of John says, Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him (John 2:11). And so Mary’s intercession strengthened the faith of others in her Son. That has always been her role: to take us by the hand and lead us to Christ. Her rosary has been called the “Gospel on a string” because she bids us to reflect on the central mysteries of the Scripture as we pray.

there is only one word which is used only onetime in the entire history of the Greek language

You mean as far as you know, which qualifier reduces its impact, while and considering the enormous weight you place on this alleged uniqueness, so will be its fall if it turns out not to be unique. As RC apologist Dave Armstrong writes, “The Catholic argument hinges on the meaning of kecharitomene.”

This angelic intelligence, herald of the Divine Presence, has access to all words fitting for his announcement to Mary, and yet has to invent a new one in order to address the handmaid Mary fittingly. Thank of that.

Except he did not, unless you want to concede that the apocryphal books of the LXX were not written till after Luke, and that the word can be used for one in Hebrew, which itself takes away from its uniqueness.

For not less than Catholic professor of biblical languages and 11 year vet of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Joseph Fitzmeyer, S.J. writes in the Anchor Bible, v. 28, pg. 345“Though the pf. Pass. Ptc. Kecharitomenos is found in the LXX of Sir 18:17 in the sense of ‘gracious man,’ here is rather designates Mary as the recipient of divine favor; it means ‘favored by God,’ another instance of the so-called theological passive (see ZGB § 236). She is favored by God to be the mother of the descendant of David and the Son of the Most High.”

Thus this foremost RC scholar renders κεχαριτωμένος in Lk. 1:28 as ‘favored by God," and since Sirach 18:17 says , 'is not a word better than a gift? but both are with a gracious [Kecharitomenos] man," than one could also argue, consistent with Cath reasoning, that such always was.

As one poster states,

If the perfect tense denotes completeness with a permanent result, then Paul teaches "once saved always saved" in Ephesians 2:8 since he uses the periphrastic perfect ἐστε σεσῳσμένοι ("you are having been saved"). . - http://forums.carm.org/vbb/printthread.php?t=219962&pp=10&page=3

I don't think either of us personally claims to be a world-class Greek scholar.

Indeed, yet the highly technical nature of this argument (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/3048576/posts?page=126#126) renders it debatable and unworthy of the weight placed upon it. For it is not simply what the word may denote, but the meaning that is extrapolated out of it.

Which i n your words, means making Mary uniquely the "Fully-Graced One." For Keating, it means, "The Greek indicates a perfection of grace. A perfection must be perfect not only intensively, but extensively. The grace Mary enjoyed must not only have been as “full” or strong or complete as possible at any given time, but it must have extended over the whole of her life, from conception." (Catholicism and Fundamentalism (p. 269). And which Caths also take to mean as being due to her surpassing virtue and position, and which ends up making her the dispenser of all grace, and a multitude of attributes which parallel Christ.

Which the Holy Spirit nowhere ascribes to Mary in the NT, and who, as Ratzinger said, “in the gospel tradition is quite marginal,” (“God and the world;” p. 296). Nowhere is she said to be the greatest saint, nor was that needed, nor prayed to, venerated above all, etc. Thus it is no wonder so much weight must be placed upon one word, and so much read out of it in transforming the virtuous, surrendered, Spirit filled women of Scripture into the fable-ous Mary of Catholicism .

Also, Hail, "highly favoured" is not a title, but a greeting which describes what she is due to being chosen to be an instrument of God, and the greeting is ike as Daniel who is called by the angel, "greatly beloved." (Dan. 10:11) And unlike where the Lord does give people a new title/name to certain people, the Holy Spirit never uses this sppsdly new title again - or gives her other titles in stark contrast to the approx 900 of Catholicism - but continues to call her Mary.

The issue is not whether Mary was graced, even before the salutation, bu whether Lk. 1:28 states was uniquely full of grace. Which conspicuously does not say "plērēs=full," and The reason why it is not used in Lk. 1:28 is because that plērēs denotes "full" 17 other places in the NT., and thus plērēs charis (full of grace) is used of the One who was/is unmistakably full of grace and Truth. (Jn. 1:14)

Your argument looks to me like one that has been often posted and pasted in various minor reiterations by Caths as if presenting a end-all "argument from the Greek," but who themselves do not know Greek, and as one who himself does not know Greek then I will mainly post from one that does.

For here is an extensive examination of the basic argument by one who has quite a resume of scholarship, Robert Dean Luginbill, Ph.D. Greek here:http://ichthys.com/mail-Mary-full-of-grace.htm

The phrase "hapax legomenon" is applied to the unique occurrence of a word in a corpus. It is not applied to the every specific form a word may take. In Greek, any given verb can potentially have hundreds of different forms (depending upon how one counts these). Therefore in any highly inflected language – like Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and virtually all of the ancient languages – trying to carry this concept which rightly belongs to core words over to individual forms is ludicrous. The word charitoo is not a true "hapax" in the Bible because it occurs more than 'once' (which is what hapax means), and because of the wide variety of forms any verb or substantive in Greek can manifest it makes no sense to apply this term to an individual form of a word and call it a "hapax" (or, alternatively, one can say such a thing, it's just that saying such a thing is meaningless). The point behind identifying a word as a hapax legomenon" (i.e., "mentioned/said only once [in the corpus]") is generally that one has very little information about what the word might mean precisely because it only occurs "once".

If a word is a "hapax" only in a particular author or specialized corpus but appears elsewhere in the language, then the value of this "uniqueness" is greatly reduced. When one has multiple contexts to judge from, one is not in the same position as in the case of a true "hapax" where there is indeed only one single context on which to base one's decision about what a word might mean. As the matter at hand actually stands, moreover, in the case of charitoo, we have an abundance of riches: 1) it occurs elsewhere in the NT; 2) it occurs widely in the literature elsewhere; 3) it is a simple verbal formation on a very well attested noun – so much so as to make its essential meaning so crystal clear that even if this verb only occurred here in all of Greek literature there would still not be any serious doubt as to its meaning.

Your correspondent does not really quibble with the essential meaning of the verb as reflected in every dictionary and every version, namely, "to bestow grace/favor upon". Where you correspondent falls down – and where he over-reaches the Greek scholars he is consulting – is in his attempt to take a simple verb form and make it bear a meaning it cannot bear. You mention that this fellow "really didn't mean that the Greek perfect form here meant that Mary was "perfect", but that is the essence of his argument. His translation is "Having been Graced with all Possible Grace both past present and future." Further he says that the "past" part means that "Mary was saved before ever falling in to sin". Clearly, this person's argument is entirely dependent upon making the perfect tense "magical" in the sense of infusing 'perfection,' even if he is trying to couch this lunacy in grammatical-sounding expressions:

Hi Dr. Luginbill--Once again, I have a question for you about "full of grace". You pointed out that Eph. 1:6 uses the same verb and it doesn't mean "full of grace" there, and therefore, "sinless". A Catholic correspondent has found this by some scholar or other; what do you think of his argument?

This argument is silly. Tense stems in Greek (and there are really only three which matter in such things: aorist, perfect, present) reflect 'aspect', which is something we have in English too (i.e., 'I go' = simple point action akin to the Greek aorist stem, vs. 'I am going' = repetitive action akin to the Greek present stem). These are not "magic", and investing them with layers of meaning invisible to the human eye and untranslatable into English is always a huge mistake (or a deliberate attempt to deceive). The Greek perfect has a meaning very similar to the English perfect, while the Greek aorist is very similar in meaning to the English past. By very similar I mean "essentially indistinguishable in the indicative mood". The only reason this issue of aspect even comes up is because Greek uses the different tense stems in places where we are no longer able to do so in English (i.e., while English users are generally unaware they even use a subjunctive, in Greek we can choose between present and aorist subjunctives in all contingent subordinate clause situations). This person's argument seems to rest entirely upon his quotation of Smyth. However, he misquotes Smyth by leaving out a critical part of the statement.

..If the perfect tense could do all the author claims, then every time it says anything about "knowing" in scripture (for oida is perfective in all of its forms), it would mean "knowing with a perfect knowledge that was conceived in eternity past": such a convention of translation would lead only to utter nonsense (cf. Acts 16:3).

More here , by God's grace.

Then you have RC apologist Akin on whether kecharitomene literally and uniquely mens "full of grace:"

A reader writes:

I was watching EWTN earlier and it was mentioned that only two people in the New Testament are referred to as “full of grace” – Jesus (John 1:14) and Mary (Luke 1:28). Of course I thought this would be a really neat thing to mention to my Protestant friends (especially if we’re talking about Jesus and Mary being the New Adam and New Eve).

BUT I wanted to go beyond the English and examine the original Greek – but I don’t know a lot about Greek! So I have two twofold questions:

(1) does John 1:14 use kecharitomene as fully (pardon the pun) as Luke’s usage in 1:28 or does John 1:14 follow more closely to Acts 6:8 when Stephen is referred to as “full of grace and power”?

John 1:14 says that Jesus was plErEs charitos, which literally means "full of grace." (Those capital Es arepresent etas, so pronounce them like the e in "they"; the word is thus pronounced PLAY-RACE).

Luke 1:28 uses kecharitomene, which literally means "one who has been graced" or "woman who has been graced" (since the gender is female). It doesn't literally mean "full of grace," though that is defensible as a free translation.

Acts 6:8 refers to Stephen as plErEs charitos, so again it's literally "full of grace" and just the same as the description used of Jesus in John 1:14.

If it is the latter, (2) does that mean there really isn’t a literal “full of grace” parallel between Luke 1:28 and John 1:14 or can I find that literal parallel somewhere else in the New Testament?

Not that I'm aware of, and I'd almost certainly be aware of it if there were. http://www.jimmyakin.org/2005/10/kecharitomene_q.html

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