Why A Former Evangelical Loves the Rosary

Catholic Online ^ | February 26, 2014 | Fr. Dwight Longenecker

[NYer]

GREENVILLE, SC (Catholic Online) - In his conversion story Rome Sweet Home Scott Hahn, the once staunchly anti-Catholic Presbyterian minister describes how, as a fervent Evangelical teenager, he discovered his grandmother's rosary beads. His grandmother had just died and the young Scott Hahn ripped the rosary in pieces crying out, "God, set her free from the chains of Catholicism that have bound her!"

Since then, Scott has discovered the power of the rosary and has written a beautiful book about the Blessed Virgin Mary called Hail Holy Queen. Scott is not the only Evangelical to have discovered the rosary. I was brought up in a similar background. After college I went to England to study and was eventually ordained an Anglican priest. As an Anglican priest I used to make my annual retreat at the Benedictine monastery of Quarr Abbey.  Just as I was about to leave for retreat a parishioner gave me a rosary. She had just returned from a pilgrimage to the medieval shrine of Walsingham and had felt led to buy me this gift. I had never used the rosary, and was prejudiced against it.

One of my guiding principles, however, was a little saying I had discovered while a student. It is, "A person is most often right in what he affirms and wrong in what he denies."

So I looked at the rosary and asked myself why I was denying something used by millions of fellow Christians. Who was more likely to be right-me or the millions? So I went to the monastery gift shop and found a little book of instruction and started to learn my way around that "chain of prayer that binds us to God."

[JPX2011]

Hail Mary = scriptural. Money phrase, “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our ddeat.” AKA pray for us to your Son.

[Sir_Ed]

Dead people don’t hear our prayers...that is necromancy, we’re told not to communicate with the dead.

Ed