The family that prays together stays together... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Wednesday, July 25, 2012, 21:13 (302 days ago) @ Joseph

Welcome, Joseph. Tom McMahon wrote a recent commentary that mentioned Fr Peyton's Rosary Crusade from the post-WWII era. I wrote a post in response which outlined my personal position in relation to the rosary. You'll find Tom's commentary HERE and my response HERE. I had told my own personal story in relation to the Rosary a few other times on Catholica including in the 5th paragraph in THIS POST in 2008 and in the opening para in THIS POST in 2006 (written under the pen name "Tom Scott".

My attitudes today are basically no different. In short summary I think praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary to intercede with God or Jesus on our behalf is basically superstitious nonsense. I simply do not believe it.

That said I do have a couple of hesitations about that. One is that there does seem to be some value in various types of meditation set around the chanting of some rhythm or mantra. This seems to be common to many cultures. There seems even some research evidence — see, for example, Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman's book "How God Changes Your Brain" — that various forms of prayer are healthy even if they do not cause Almighty God to extend his great hairy arm down into our soup to stir up the weather or the atoms in our bodies.

Secondly, I think any community, and more especially some religious community, does need some "unifying symbols, ritual and liturgies", that help express the aspirations, hopes, unity and community of the assembly. In a sense you can't have community without such symbols and rituals. It can be argued that the very sense of "community" in Catholicism is crumbling evidenced by the fact that nearly 90% of its core baptized constituency across the Western world has given up participation in the core liturgies such as Eucharist and Reconciliation — and one presumes the drop off in saying the rosary has been equally steep or worse. Self-evidently from the evidence of this enormous drop-out rate a lot of people are no longer convinced about the value of these rituals and practices.

Many people who have dropped out of participation still think of themselves as "Catholic" though. They haven't given up the name even if they have given up the practice. What those people eventually do is the gzillion dollar question. Will they eventually become atheists and agnostics or will they form some new form of community and develop new rituals and prayer forms that give better expression to their aspirations.

Did Jesus say "the rosary"? Did Jesus invent "the rosary"? I think not. It was a much later invention. Why shouldn't newer forms evolve in the future? What are your answers?

Brian Coyne
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