Please explain the origin of holy rosary?

Answer 1

OK - I get to be the first Catholic to answer on here.

No one for sure knows who started the Rosary, but it was first popularized in the 1200's by St. Dominic, who was the founder of the Dominicans, an order of itenerant preachers who were/are priests and monks. (My wife and I were married by a Dominican priest BTW) St. Dominic encouraged it's recitation as a means of increasing piety and prayerfulness among the faithful. This was all during a time of great apostasy and heresy coming against the Church.

The Rosary is actually a form of meditative prayer. When we pray the Rosary, we are not repeating "vain and repetitous prayers" as some anti-Catholics accuse us of. What we are doing while we are saying the decets (groups of ten Hail Marys) is reflecting and meditating on the Mysteries of Christ's life and earthly ministry, which are proclaimed or announced before each decet. It is actually a beautiful and very spiritual way of praying, if it is done in this way, and not mechanically just repeating things.

Tibetan Buddhist monks would understand what I'm saying here and identify with it. Yes, other religions have prayer beads and also the same type of meditative prayer, but that doesn't mean that one is borrowed from the other, or that meditative and contemplative prayer is somehow unChristian. The fact that more than one religion has this aspect is called "parallel anthropological development". There are some aspects of religion that have a common thread throughout all or most of them in man's quest to know God.

The Rosary likely started out as a simple meditative devotion done by the faithful laypeople of the time immediately preceding St. Dominic, who as I mentioned popularized it's recitation. People were already saying it before he came along. The Rosary has also been known in some times and places as "The Dry Mass" because it was said in place of Mass when there were no priests availible to say Mass - in times of persecution of the Church for example. People would gather and recite the Rosary and other prayers in place of a regular Catholic Mass.

Answer 2

i've got consistently heard that the early priests of the church used stones to wish the Psalms and at last used knots, then finally the rosary became used. Why shouldn't she be an evangelical Christian? I advise, i do no longer precisely believe evangelical Christianity and clearly you do no longer the two yet it isn't any reason she shouldn't. in case you prefer to be Catholic, then by ability of all ability stay Catholic yet enable her do as she needs.

Answer 3

The word rosary comes from Latin and means a garland of roses, the rose being one of the flowers used to symbolize the Virgin Mary.

The rosary was brought to us through St. Dominic

In the time of St. Dominic, there existed a serious heresy that was spreading within the church. A heresy is a belief that has been rejected by the church, and is considered a wrong ideology of anything relating to spiritual events. The particular heresy in St. Dominic's time was wide spread in France, and was called the Albigensian heresy. This heresy simply stated that there were two gods. One "good god" who created the spirit world, and one "evil god" who created the material world. The spiritual world made by the good god was essentially good, and anything made in the material world (including the body of a person) was essentially evil. This idea started to be combined with elements of the church. The heretics believed in Satan, but they believed that Satan had imprisoned spirits made by the "good god" in physical bodies. they also stated that anything that could be done to release that person from this prison here on earth should be done. This included killing of other people and of suicide. The main part of this heresy that got extremely rampant was the belief that Christ could not have been truly a man if he was the Son of God. He could only have been of the spiritual realm. According to this popular thought, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the trinity, the incarnation, the sacraments instituted by Christ, hell and purgatory were simply illusions and did not truly exist. It was a complete denial of the crucial cornerstone of Christianity which was Christ himself as our redeemer. It also stated that Satan had as much power as God did, and that good and evil are equally a powerful force in the world and good could not exist without evil (modernly called dualism). All of the concepts listed here are tragically wrong, and the church recognized this quickly as something that was not part of the official teachings of the church, but the heresy began to grow tremendously. It became worse and worse as the clergy in southern France became morally laxed and more and more worldly (yes clergy are human and they do make mistakes). It was also flourished by many French nobility that desired to take over church land and attempted to buy it from immoral clergy. St. Dominic had his work cut out for him when he departed as a missionary to southern France.

It is at this time along St. Dominic's journey that it is reported that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him. In her apparition, she told Dominic to teach people the meditations of Mary and of Christ, and if he did so, the heresy would be dispelled from France. This is exactly what occurred. What St. Dominic did was combine the prayers and the meditations of both "versions" of the "rosary." Eventually after widespread teachings on the meditations of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the heresy was ignored and the church regained its original piety. This was the first widespread teaching of the rosary, and is why St. Dominic is attributed with its success and creation.

For more information, please read: http://www.catholic-truth.org/Essays/rosary.htm

http://www.catholic.com/library/rosary.asp

Answer 4

For an in-depth analysis read the following chapter:
http://philologos.org/__eb-ttb/sect54.htm

Blessings,

Jack

Answer 5

http://www.catholic-truth.org/Essays/rosary.htm