Since today is the last Monday for October of this year, and since October is considered the Month of the Holy Rosary by the Catholic Church, I thought it would be good to turn our attention to another “Rose” from St. Louis De Montfort’s great work on the Rosary, The Secret of the Rosary. We can never learn enough or read enough from the many great Saints that lived before us. In years to come, people will be reading about and learning from the Saints that are living today.

Speaking on the Psalter or Rosary of Our Lady, St. Louis De Montfort says the following…

“Ever since Saint Dominic established the devotion to the Holy Rosary up until the time when Blessed Alan de la Roche re-established it in 1460 it has always been called the Psalter of Jesus and Mary. This is because it has the same number of Angelic Salutations as there are psalms in the Book of the Psalms of David. Since simple and uneducated people are not able to say the Psalms of David the Rosary is held to be just as fruitful for them as David’s Psalter is for others.

But the Rosary can be considered to be even more valuable than the latter for three reasons:

1. Firstly, because the Angelic Psalter bears a nobler fruit, that of the Word Incarnate, whereas David’s Psalter only prophesies His coming;

2. Secondly, just the as real thing is more important than its prefiguration and as the body is more than its shadow, in the same way the Psalter of Our Lady is greater than David’s Psalter which did no more than prefigure it;

3. And thirdly, because Our Lady’s Psalter (or the Rosary made up of the Our Father and Hail Mary) is the direct work of the Most Blessed Trinity and was not made through a human instrument.

Our Lady’s Psalter or Rosary is divided up into three parts of five decades each, for the following special reasons:

1. To honor the three Persons of the Most Blessed Trinity;

2. To honor the life, death, and glory of Jesus Christ;

3. To imitate the Church Triumphant, to help the members of the Church Militant and t to lessen the pains of the Church suffering;

4. To imitate the three groups into which the Psalms are divided:

a. The first being for the purgative life,

b. The second for the illuminative life,

c. And the third for the unitive life;

5. And finally, to give us graces in abundance during our lifetime, peace at death, and glory in eternity.”

So as we close out this year’s Month of the Rosary, let us pray for the special intercession of Our Lady of the Rosary and St. Louis De Montfort, that through their prayers and the Holy Rosary we may contemplate the mysteries of the Gospel message proclaimed by Jesus Christ and grow closer to Him each day and every day we pray the Rosary. Amen.