The Power of the Daily Family Rosary - A Collection of Homilies by Venerable Patrick Peyton, C.S.C.

Family prayer invites Mary and her Son into our homes and hearts as the most powerful force in heaven and earth. It is especially the Rosary that helps to strengthen the family in an unbreakable bond of love, peace, trust and joy.

We have compiled a small collection of Father Peyton’s homilies on this subject to inspire families to adopt the Daily Family Rosary as a means of spiritual growth, unity and protection against life’s many challenges and its forces of evil.

We hope you enjoy reading the words of Venerable Patrick Peyton, C.S.C.

God bless you.

Holy Cross Family Ministries hcfm.org

The family that prays together stays together.

The Enemy is the Devil

My dear people,

Last night I offered a means that was possible and easy for you and powerful enough to defend you, to protect you against the spirit of the world. Tonight, I want to continue in that same line of thought. I want to offer you a means that is easy and possible and powerful enough to protect you against an enemy that, as far as you are concerned, has only one purpose in mind, and that is that you will lose your soul, that you will never reach heaven, that you will never spend an eternity with God and with His Blessed Mother. That enemy is the devil.

The devil is not something far away. The devil is a person with an intelligence. He is close to you. That intelligence is greater than any human intelligence. To put it in our crude language, he is so superior to us in intelligence that he can wrap the smartest of us around his little finger. The devil is interested in us every second of the twenty-four hours; his traps for you are planned and laid according to your individual weaknesses. His plan is to bring you to ruin, and it is guided by a malicious intelligence.

In his work to accomplish this, he has two allies that, of themselves, without the direction of the superior mind of his, would be powerful enough to bring any of us to ruin if we did not fortify ourselves with the proper means to overcome them. Those two allies are the world and the flesh.

The devil is an archangel who has fallen. He hates God; he hates the friends of God; he is out to thwart the will and wishes of God. All the powers that he possessed as an archangel - his great intelligence, his strong will - all these powers that he could have used for good, that he could have used to love God, he now uses to hate God and to bring ruin to men.

That creature, the devil, is your personal, mortal enemy. Whether you admit his existence or not, whether you are aware of his presence or not, whether you bury your head in the sand as an ostrich - none of these things will deny the fact that the devil is out for your ruin. If you fight him alone, if you pit your intelligence against his intelligence, and your will and your powers against his, you will lose. If you fight the devil alone, you will fail just as surely as you are sitting there. It is precisely because men and women and homes in our age have tried to fight him alone or because they have become blind to his presence - it is because of these things that they have failed.

This blindness or unawareness of the devil is but a trap he uses - for the deadliest enemy is the enemy that is living with you, and you are not aware of him. It is precisely because men and women have tried to fight him with their own powers or have become blind to his presence that we have this day the

sorrowful sight of homes without faith, and homes without hope, and homes without charity. One cannot overestimate the diabolical designs and the enmity of the devil for each one of you.

In any man or woman, boy or girl, there are two great gifts that, when they are present in a man or a woman, boy or girl, there is human dignity in that person. That person can walk the roadway of life with his head high - he has power to do good. He is good. But when these two gifts are taken away - taken away from a man, a woman, a boy, or a girl - then their human dignity is gone. To quote another’s words: “There is no dignity in a mountain if there is no dignity in man.” For man or woman deprived of these two gifts or treasures - for them there is no dignity in the mountain, for there is no dignity in the eyes that look upon the mountain. Those two gifts are faith and chastity.

The devil and his two allies have taken faith and chastity away from persons who once possessed them. To make known these facts to you, to rouse up your fear for the devil will not help much unless there is a remedy offered to you. Please God and Mary, I will offer that remedy to you tonight. Alone - fight the devil alone, and you will fail. This night, however, I offer you an ally - and if you accept her, if you take her as your ally, just as surely as you are sitting there, you will win. That ally is the Blessed Virgin Mary - the Mother of God, your Mother.

When the devil had his first victory over man, God Himself saw to it that Mary would destroy him whenever and wherever he rose up. God showed him when he had his first victory over man that it would be a woman who would bring defeat upon him. That woman is Mary. Today she has that same power to bring ruin to the devil as she had on Calvary when her Son took the devil’s kingdom from him.

But Mary, however, is a human being - a real woman - a woman with a heart and a soul and a body like your own. Her ways are human ways. If you sit back in your easy chair and tell Mary that you are in trouble and that you have a desperate enemy - and do nothing more about it than that - she might well answer you that if a thing or a gift or a friendship is worth getting, it is worth asking for; she might tell you that in proportion as you value that gift or that friendship, in that proportion are you willing to pay the price for such a gift or such a friend. Tonight, I will offer you a means that will without fail win for you the support and the friendship of Our Lady, that will without fail bring Our Lady to your side as an ally, that will without fail bring defeat to your archenemy. That means is the Daily Family Rosary.

During the next few days, we will support all the claims that we have made so far about the power of the Family Rosary. I will finish up tonight with a few general remarks borne out, supported by history, by faith, and by the Vicar of Christ, her Divine Son here on earth. The surest, the easiest, the most certain

way of reaching God is through the power of His Mother, or through Our Lady, through Mary. The surest, the easiest, and the most certain way of reaching Mary is by that prayer that all men and women, even children, admit is here preferred prayer - the Rosary. And great and powerful as one Rosary is when it is said alone, yet we know how much more powerful it is, how much more pleasing it is to Our Lady and how much greater a weapon it is when said day after day, month after month, by a father and mother, brothers and sisters. May God and Mary inspire you to use the means that will save you from the snares and the traps of an enemy that hates you. The worst enemy that you have on earth has at least a little pity left; the worst human enemy that you can think of here on earth at least has a little pity - but as far as the devil is concerned, there is not the slightest spark of pity left in the devil. From him you can never expect the slightest pity or mercy. Do not deprive yourself, then, or your children or those within your home, of the great weapon that will save you from such an enemy.

Family Prayer: A Necessity in the Life of the Family

Dear people,

I want you to know that these nine days of special effort are not ordinary days for you. They are extraordinary days. They are not like the days gone by. They will come to an end surely like other days, but the opportunities and the graces of these nine days, once they are over, will never come across your path again. These days are forming a part of the story of your life. Right now, the Blessed Mother of God is praying for you. Right now, she has obtained from her Divine Son many graces, gifts, and powers for you. She is holding them out to you.

One of them in particular is the grace, the gift, the power of this novena. She is holding that gift in her hands for you to take.

It is this: the invitation, the inducement, the grace to bring into your home the Family Rosary - and to keep it there. Take that gift from your Mother’s hands! Take into your possession a means or a weapon that will save yourself and them from your deadly enemy. Use the means by which you will prove your love for Our Lady. Do not let heaven and earth look upon this page of the story of your life and find this, that your Mother held out to you a gift - and a precious giftand you refused to take it.

Tonight, we will continue in our efforts to deepen your conviction about the power and the necessity of this Family Rosary. We will continue in our efforts to deepen your convictions about it. Tonight, the reason I will offer you is this: the necessity of prayer, daily, fervent prayer in the life of an individual and in the life of a family.

If you ask yourself today why you are alive, why you breathe this air, why you are sitting here tonight, if you ask yourself why is it that you are a man or a woman with a soul that can never die, with powers that make you like to angels - understanding, memory, freedom, imagination - if you ask yourself why it is that you have that particular body, that you have it with all its powers and gracefulness and attractiveness, if you ask [why] is it that you are not a blade of grass that the cattle can eat and walk upon, or why you are not a piece of wood that men put together to keep their home warm, or why you are not some animal - the answer is only this, for all of these questions and the thousand more that you can ask yourself - the only answer to it all is because of the love of God for you. And that good God had a plan for you, not just when you were born but from all eternity. When you came into existence, He offered you every means by which you could realize that plan. What is that plan?

Oh, so theoretically we say, “To enjoy the beatific vision, and to be with God forever” - “To be in heaven forever” - “To be happy forever.” These words are so theoretic and general that they cannot even begin to tell us the plan of God for you; not even in heaven when you see Him will you be able to appreciate the life of God for you. But in some crude way in our own poor language, we might be able to tell you in a little way what it is to be with God forever.

Think back, as far back as you can - remember all or any of the creatures, animate or inanimate, that for a moment raised your heart to God. It may have been a noble man or a beautiful, noble woman, or it might have been a flower or a song, or the forest, or the waves of the sea. The setting sun or the moonlight may have raised your thoughts to God. All of these creatures or any of these creatures that …that compelled you to say that life was worth living, that made you say, “Dear God, these things put me in mind of you, these things help me

to know and love you” - and you were right. The beauty of all these things help you to know God. But the beauty of all these things God has and a million times more, and if this minute you could see before your eyes everything in this wide world that compels the human heart to love it - all the truth and the loveliness and the beauty of this world - were it here before your eyes, God has it and a million times more. All these things would only be a little mirror showing you the real reality of the goodness and beauty that is God. To enjoy, to love, and to possess all this for eternity, that was the plan of God for you.

But God is a spirit, and we cannot see Him, we cannot hear Him, we cannot touch Him while we are here on earth. And we have bodies, and the material things that we can touch and hear have great power over us. The only thing that will keep love in a man or a woman or a boy or a girl, and convictions about God that I have just told you, is daily, fervent prayer.

The only thing on earth that will keep a man or a woman, a boy or a girl going day after day towards God and keep them day after day away from the material things that would stand in your way to God, the only thing that will do it is daily, fervent prayer. And as surely as you are sitting here tonight, when prayer becomes weak in the life of the man, the power of the material creature grows in proportion in the life of that man. And if prayer goes out of a man’s life or a woman’s, the material thing will grow so powerful that it can turn the love of man completely towards itself, and that is mortal sin. But just as prayer is so necessary in the life of an individual, for the same reason family prayer is necessary in the life of a family.

The family is not just a group of persons under a roof. The family is one unit - the same flesh and blood. A grand plan for that family [is] prepared and thought out from all eternity - the greatest joy for that family, after possession of God and Mary in Heaven, is the joy of being together again for eternity. So that that plan of Almighty God would be fulfilled, think of all the graces that were put in our way. Or to put it in our own language, think of the anxiety that God showed for that family from all eternity.

As you listen to me tonight, you might be the father or the mother or the brother or the sister in your home. You have a name, you have a happy home; just imagine how the providence of God guided your ancestors down through one calamity after another of the past generations, of the past ages. Think of the plagues that spread throughout the world laying low family after family - in any of which the name of your family could have been wiped out - but for your sake and for your little home today, God saw to it that it would not be, was not wiped out. Not only that, but God’s merciful and loving wisdom brought it about that this particular boy and this particular girl was to be your son and your daughter.

Your family is something sacred and holy, a unit. For your family, for all the members of your family to have deep in their hearts these convictions about the end God has in store for all of them, about the sacred relationship to each other - to keep that family going straight to Almighty God, walking day after day in the strong, holy way that He has mapped out for them, to keep away from that family today the enemies, the many enemies that will do their best and in so many cases successfully to break them up, to take away fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, to take from their hearts or from the hearts of one or more of the members of that family the convictions about God, to do all these things - a beautiful home, lovely, attractive furniture, fine meals - these and all the other material comforts you can list will not succeed. The greatest thing that will succeed is family prayer. To do all the things that I have just said, family prayer is necessary. And of all the prayers I have no apology in saying that the Rosary is the best.

Because a family is composed of many persons, there is bound to be some friction throughout the day; it may be great or small. But when that group of persons kneel down together to say the Rosary of Mary, before those ten minutes are over, they will rise up with forgiveness for each other and will have for each other stronger love in their hearts. The day’s weaknesses will be forgotten, and they will be stronger to face another day. Secondly, in a home that is faithful to the Daily Family Rosary, such a thing cannot exist - habitual mortal sin. The family will have to give up one or the other. The spirit of Mary and the spirit of the devil cannot exist together in the same house.

My dear people, it is hard to bring a point home by generalizations. I may not bring home to you sufficiently by the words I have given what the Family Rosary means to a family and what that family that says the Family Rosary means to the Mother of God. If you can imagine - and this part is easy - a deer or a little helpless animal chased by wild beasts. The little animal is being cornered, and she finally comes to a wall that is impossible to cross and to a gate that is too high for it to cross. And the wild beasts - lions, or tigers, or wolves - are surrounding it on the other three sides and closing in on it. Then, in the last minute, a hand moved with pity and with love for that frightened little animal opens that gate and lets it free and safe, and when it has passed through, that hand closes the gate and bars it. Then you can picture yourself and hear the howling and the scratching of the wolves on the other side; they have lost their prey. They are doing their best to get through, but they cannot; the gate is strong and the merciful person is standing on the other side to make sure that they cannot get through.

My dear people, I should not say anymore; I need not say anymore. That merciful hand is the hand of Our Lady, and that gate is the Family Rosary, and that family is that family that this day, whether it admits it or not, is surrounded

by a fierce and awful band bent on only one thing, to take from it its life. I don’t mean your physical life, I mean something greater - your spiritual life. Be brave enough, be courageous enough and grateful enough to the Great Mother, your Mother, and use the means that she is offering you - the Daily Family Rosary.

United in Prayer

My dear people,

Tonight, again I ask you to make a firm, determined resolution to bring the Family Rosary into your home, to gather all the members of the family or as many as possible at some time throughout the day or evening and recite the five decades of the Rosary. The reason I will give you tonight is because of the happiness and peace it will bring into your home, because of the completeness and perfection it will give your family life, because it is such a simple but beautiful means of bringing out of your family all of the hidden power for good that is in your family. We can talk about perfection, and we can sit down in a chair and try to figure it out in words, yet a child even knows what it is in the real, practical life. I am thrilled when I see perfection in a person or a thing.

I feel sure that any man or woman is thrilled at the sight of perfection when he sees or she sees something doing what is expected of it, using all the powers that it has to accomplish what is expected of it and doing that with ease and gracefulness. I am thrilled when I stand beside a railroad track and watch that engine flying past; it gives me a feeling of power and of strength, a feeling of constancy and sureness. As I stand and watch it, it inspires me. What is the secret of it? The secret is the metal that it was made of, not just wood, but of metal that could stand the work it had to do. The workmanship that went into it and the tightened bolts and springs, the form and the shape of it, the road that it travels, and capable of bearing such an engine, the woodwork, the alert man who controls it. All these things bring about the perfection that is the speeding train that I watch go by me. And it thrills me. It inspires me.

It thrills me, too, to watch a racehorse - to watch that particular animal, to watch it come out and take its stand among so many others. The signal is given. They start out and the particular strength and the power of that animal is held in for the final test that will come to it, and it wins the race. It starts out, keeping pace with the others. Keeping pace with them until it is getting towards the end of

the race, the great test before it. That horse meets the test - all the energy and the power of that animal are used and he leaves the others behind him. What is the secret? It is the blood that is in that animal - the blood of a thoroughbred, the care that was given that animal, the training that was given it, and the use of that power, and training, the use of all its own power to carry through in the way that it should carry through. It was trained to race, to win; it does race and it does win. It does what it is supposed to do; it does it gracefully, flawlessly, easily. It is a perfect animal.

But I am much more thrilled, much more inspired by the sight of a noble man, a man, let us say, like Pius XII. In his face, the lines of character, in his appearance, you can see the strength of mind and of will that is in that man. He shows you in his face that he is a man that will not compromise; he gives you the impression of a man that will not stop short of completeness in a work that he will undertake. All the power of mind and soul within him he will use to accomplish the work he will undertake. Such a man gives you confidence. You can trust such a man. You know that he will do what he is supposed to do, will do it as it should be done. He will live out a perfect life.

A noble woman inspires me. A noble woman - her external behavior, her conduct, her bearing, her qualities of soul and mind and heart, her kindness, her courage, her unselfishness, the qualities that spring from a sureness of her dignity and from the powers of her mind and heart and soul - the powers of a noble woman demand and receive respect wherever she goes.

These examples, my dear people, are long drawn out, but they are what I mean by perfection, what I mean by a person using all his powers for good, not falling short - completing in his life or her life what the metal things, such as an engine, or a train, or a racing airplane, or in the animal life, such as a racehorse, does in their life - using the powers God and man have given them to do what God wants them to do.

And as you sit here listening to me, you might have a feeling of regret, a feeling of sadness as you see illustrated for you these examples of what you should be, what you should do with the powers God has given you; but not one of you need feel sad. Beneath the roof of the humblest home in our country today where there exists a father, mother and sons and daughters - beneath such a roof there exists such powers that, were they used to their fullest extent, they would produce admiration in the angels. My dear people, the powers beneath the roof where there lives father and mother, brothers and sisters, human language cannot tell fittingly; human powers cannot tell what those powers are. Take any one of the members of that home; take the father; or take them all together.

God has placed within that home souls that will never die. And He has endowed those souls with powers, spiritual powers that time and place cannot stand in

the way of the power to understand and the power to think, powers that will enable them, if they will, to go back ten hundred years and by the powers of their imagination that can live with the people of those times. They have the powers of freedom, unlike the animals; this group of persons has the power to do this or reject that, or to plan something different, things that mere animals cannot do.

They have bodies with powers that in themselves are great, but their powers are ennobled and lifted up by the powers of their souls so that with their eyes they can look upon the other creatures God has made and from the sight of those creatures they can glorify God. Their ears can hear beautiful songs that will raise their minds to God. The noble thoughts of a soul they can express in words or in song of their own; and what is more, far more, they have powers within them to merit heaven. They have powers within them, each one that is in the state of grace has powers to win and merit the eternal friendship of God and heaven for eternity.

That group of persons, that father and mother, brothers and sisters, can gather around after their day’s work is done and find happiness right in each other’s company. Their home is a happy home; they are familiar with each other; they have confidence in one another; there is no reserve or holding back. Such a home is a home, and a happy, home and a holy home because it is blessed, because it has placed within each one of the members of that family the power to make a home like that; and they have used the powers to make it so.

But because of the fact that we have free will which even God respects, there is grave danger that such a family will not use all the powers that they have given them. They may fall short; they will not live out the complete life that they can live if they want to. Today it does not need much proof to say that families are not living out the complete family life, that they are falling far short of the happiness and perfection and the completeness that could exist in their family life. That many families, instead of the father and the mother and the brothers and the sisters helping each other, hinder each other, place obstacles in the way of each other, and instead of a family being united as one by their upright, holy, and happy lives, influencing the very nation they belong to, they help lower the standards of that nation. You know this to be true. You know that it could be just the opposite. You know that your own family can do great things to influence the goodness of your community, of your nation.

For a family to operate together daily, to be constantly aware of their dignity and their mission on earth, to keep alive within themselves the truth that they are God’s children, blessed on earth, placed on earth for precisely God’s glory and the salvation of their own souls, that every free action they do is a power to win heaven; to keep all these truths alive, there is something more needed

in that home than, let us say, the material furnishings of that home, however costly and beautiful they may be. There is something more than these things needed. There is needed, just as surely as the metal is needed in the train, just as training is needed in the racehorse, there is needed in this family something spiritual that will hold them together - and that thing is family prayer. To bring into that family’s life the completeness and perfection they need, the Family Rosary is needed.

For in a home where there are several persons, because of individual characteristics, differences in temperaments, there are inevitably disagreements, great or small. But if that family is faithful to the Rosary - then when they kneel down together at the end of the day, they forget these little differences, these little disagreements. They rise up after those sacred ten minutes closer to each other, closer to God, renewed in spirit and united in spirit so as to face another day - together.

Such a family is paying to their God, not some sentimental homage, but it is paying a real act of adoration. By their action, such a family is equivalently saying to God:

“Dear Father, for twenty-four hours almost each day we might not see eye to eye under this roof, about persons and things and incidents we may disagree; but, Father, about You we will not disagree. During these ten minutes we will be one in mind and heart and sentiment, paying homage to You. Recognizing Your excellence and our dependence, we offer this up to You for today’s blessing, and we make a great act of faith in all the truths that You have given man, for we know they are contained in the Rosary.”

And God, the most sensitive and the best of friends, for this gesture of friendship, this act of adoration on the part of this family, God will pour down on such a home His special and particular graces to make that home complete, to make it perfect. The members of that home will work together, they will be united as they should be united in the things that count, in the things of God. They will be fulfilling in their lives constantly, surely, flawlessly the purpose for which God put them on earth. Each one of them will be living as he and she should live, using his and her powers as he should, and using them, too, united as a family. They will be doing what God wants them to do - they will be filling out a perfect life, not separately, but in a united way.

Where Two or More are Gathered

My dear people,

Once again I ask you to bring the Daily Family Rosary into your home. Tonight, my hope of succeeding with each of you is based on your sense of love and gratitude and on your willingness to do and to obey the least wishes of one of the best friends in your life - Jesus Christ. Who is Jesus Christ? Oh, even the tiniest one among us will answer: He is our Savior who redeemed us. We were saved by Him. But, my dear people, time, centuries have taken away from us the great love and mercy and pity, and the suffering, and the grand story of Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Salvation, our Redeemer.

Let us try, in a poor way at that, to bring home to ourselves tonight what is behind these great words or names. As I told you in one of the sermons, the name of God speaks to us of everything that is good and beautiful and true. He is everything that the human heart can love or the human heart is compelled to love when it meets it face-to-face. In God there is nothing disagreeable, there is nothing to repel. God, my dear people, is grand! It was His longing to share His own happiness that urged Him to create us.

Two classes of His creatures offended Him mortally. Oh, just as I said at the beginning, this has been preached so often that it has lost its force and power. But it is an awful thing for a creature to mortally offend His God. A creature that owes his life and the continuation of that life, that owes everything that he has - even the power to offend Him - he owes to his God, and the strength that he gets from His good God, he uses it to sin against Him.

We cannot understand what it is for a creature to offend mortally his Creator. We can understand how frightful a thing it is, let us say, for a son or a daughter to spit in the face of his mother or her mother, especially if that mother is irreproachable and has done nothing but what is good for that son or daughter. Well, that is nothing in comparison to a creature turning his back on God. Well, both classes of God’s creatures did this to Him.

One of them, the angels, led by Lucifer, turned their back on God and mortally offended Him. These angels were far superior to us. They were pure spirits; intellects and wills they had, far above ours. Men fell; the other class of God’s creatures, men, fell. Man is far inferior to the angels, his intellects and his will are far inferior, far weaker. Not only that, but man shares something in common with the lower class of creatures, the animals. But notice the strange story of both of these fallen classes of creatures. The angels never regained the friendship of God. And every single man of us and every single woman of us and every child here that has reached the use of reason has within himself the power to win the eternal friendship of God. And why?

Why is it that the inferior class made up to God again and the great spirits and the superior class did not? The answer is this: they could not, and we could. The reason is because the angels, all of them together, could not bridge the chasm that existed between their God and themselves. Angelic nature could not bridge that chasm. There was not a single angel among them that could make up to God and apologize sufficiently to God and win His friendship for all the rest of them. But human nature did have right within itself the very power to bridge that chasm, to make up to Almighty God more than enough for the insult that man offered Him.

Within the ranks of men there was a man that had the power within Himself to make adequate reparation for the insult of mankind. There was amongst men one man who could speak for all the rest of them; He could speak on behalf of human nature and give adequate apology, give sufficient atonement to the good God so that He would blot out forever the insult man had offered Him. There was amongst men one man who could take upon Himself that guilt of all the others and with His life wipe out that guilt before the eyes of God. There was among fallen men a man who could bridge that chasm, who could make a bridge across; that man did all these things for us. He took upon Himself our guilt, the guilt of you and me. He completed that bridge - the one bridge, the one road that leads us to God. He walked across it Himself. He paid the price for our sins by His life. He walked across, for He is our leader, and He invites all of us to follow Him. There is no other road but that one.

Who is that man? He is Jesus Christ. A real man with a body and a soul and mind and heart. He has eyes and ears and nature just as you have, a real man with a real human nature. But He is also God. He repaid God who had been offended. He became one of us; He became a real man to save us and ennoble us. And if we ask ourselves further why it is that good God, Jesus, came down to the inferior creature that had fallen and raised up that creature again instead of going to the superior one that had fallen and became [text missing]. If we ask ourselves why, the answer I do not hesitate to give is this. It is because the angels did not have a Mary amongst them, but we did. Oh, my dear people, we can use words to tell of the excellence of Mary, but they will not be enough.

As I said of some of the other names, the force that piety and centuries of use have taken from them have left them poor. So it is with all the adjectives we could use of Mary. But let us say this: that she was so good that the Son of God from all eternity, calling the Divine Person His Father, loved Mary so much that he wanted to call her His mother. This reference to Mary in this particular sermon is only incidental. I want to bring you back to the main thought again and that is to Jesus Christ.

He appeared on earth then to undo the evil that Adam and Eve brought down

upon us. He did not take a long time to do it. He did not waste words or actions. Everything He said, every action He did, every wish He manifested were meant for you and me this day just as surely as they were meant for the man and woman and child listening to Him those years He walked amongst men. He was their leader. He is our leader. He wanted to show us the way back to God - the only way, the way that He traveled. He gave many instructions, many recommendations, but notice how He insisted on, how He emphasized prayer. Prayer, prayer, prayer - that was the keynote of His life and of His teaching. But with the divine mind that He had, with the divine command that He had undertaken, with the leadership that He had assumed and the consequences of it, He gave two recommendations for better prayer. Not in so many words, but equivalently He told them the way they should pray. If you want your prayer to be better than ordinary, if you want your prayer to obtain merit, to obtain more surely what you are asking, if you want your prayer to be more effective in getting what you wish, in guiding you and leading you to the one road that leads to God, to the road that I have walked upon, then go down on your knees together. Pray in a group, pray, pray within your home, pray with the members of your family, “for where there are two or more consenting upon earth about anything, my Father will grant it to you,” “for where two or more are gathered together for my sake, there am I in the midst of them.”

That was the first recommendation of our leader for perfect prayer. So a family that says the Family Rosary fulfills perfectly this recommendation, for there are at least two in that home saying the most perfect of all family prayers: the Rosary. Our Lord is a guest in such a home. And, my dear people, in this day when to the least intelligent of us the conditions of home life and its decay are so obvious, prayer is needed. There is only one salvation for such decay, and that is to bring Jesus Christ into such a home, into every home.

The second recommendation for better prayer given by none other than our Lord is this: pray always. Notice again how he emphasized perseverance in prayer. If you want your prayers to do what you want them to do, then pray constantly. Oh, when the president of the United States makes a public statement, how commentators and politicians tear it apart and look it over and every word they examine, and he in turn is aware of that; he makes sure that he knows the importance of the words he uses. It is so different from the private conversations that we hold with each other, where words are plentiful and we have no fear of having to give an account of them again.

Well if that is the case with the president of one small, tiny section of this world, how more important, how much more full of meaning must be the words of Almighty God who is the spokesman and leader of the entire world and for all ages. Imagine, then, the awful importance of these words that He uses in regard

to the second recommendation. Pray always; knock, seek, ask. The family that says the 53 Hail Marys of the Rosary every night, and keeps that up every day of their life, are fulfilling perfectly this second recommendation of the Savior of the world.

To bring all this home to you at a glance, to show you the importance of the Daily Family Rosary in your life, think often of this. God is offended; angels offend Him, men offend Him, mortally. The angels could not recover, cannot recover that friendship, because there is no angel amongst them powerful enough to do it. Man recovered that friendship because there was amongst men one who was powerful enough to do it. He is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Man, fallen man, had one person among them that attracted God to them rather than to the angels. That person was Mary, God’s Mother.

Jesus Christ took upon Himself the guilt of all men. He paid the penalty for them by His life, by His death. By that atonement He merited for Himself and for all of us, His brothers and sisters, the power to become the friends of God forever. To help us understand this, to help us win the friendship of God and to maintain it, He built the one, only road that will lead us across the chasm, for it cannot be crossed by other roads. We all must pass by that one road that He has passed over first. He invites all of us to follow Him. If man refused to follow Him, if he refuses to cross this bridge, then there is no salvation for him. Christ walked amongst us, gave us instructions and advises us, and tells us of the dangers that stand in our way. He left rules and regulations to help us, and if we follow these rules and regulations, we cannot miss the road.

Amongst these rules and regulations, He put most emphasis on prayer as the sure means to keep on this road and to find it again if we have lost it. But He gave two recommendations to make that prayer better, our prayer better, to give men and women more certainty of discovering it and finding it again if they have lost it. These two recommendations are fulfilled perfectly by the family that is faithful to the Daily Family Rosary. Ten minutes out of twenty-four hours, these sacred minutes out of twenty-four hours, and that family is fulfilling the two recommendations of the Savior of men, of their souls.

The Will of God

My dear people,

Once again I ask you to make the firm resolution to bring the Daily Family Rosary into your home and keep it there always. The reason I will give you tonight to urge you to do this is that the Daily Family Rosary is the shortest and the easiest way by which you can fulfill as a family the particular vocation in life that belongs to you. All men and women and children have one end in common, no matter whether you belong to the ranks of cardinals of popes or whether you are the youngest child just baptized, for all there is just one end, and that is to know, to love, and to serve God here on earth and by that service to win an eternity of happiness in heaven, by that service to merit the eternal friendship of God in heaven.

But, my dear people, to reach that end that is given to all of us there are a thousand different ways, there are a thousand different roads leading to that one great end of all men. And when a boy or girl stands on this day before these many, many roads, he or she will choose the one to which he or she is most inclined, the one best suited for his or her own capabilities. I shall mention three or four of these particular roads to bring home to you as a family or a particular member of a family the vocation that is yours.

There was a time when I myself was a free man - a lay person standing freely before many of these possible ways to particular vocations by which I could fulfill the great purpose of my life, to know and to love and to serve God here on earth and to be happy with Him in heaven. I rejected all of them for one: I chose the priesthood as the best means by which I could fulfill that purpose in life. I did not take upon myself its obligations, burdens, and privileges without knowing in some great measure what those were. Years and years and years of study and preparation to take upon myself, a creature as I am, the obligations and the privilege and the duty of being a mediator between God and men, to speak to my God on behalf of my fellow men, to bring to my God and offer Him the gifts and prayers and the sacrifices of my fellow men. To plead for my fellow men, and on the other hand, to speak to my fellow men for God, to give to my fellow men from God His wishes, His gifts, His desires.

It is a great obligation and a great privilege to take upon oneself the life of a priest, to live that, you might say, lonely life that stands in the middle between heaven and earth, and that, as long as I live, those obligations and those duties will exist for me whether I care to admit them or not, whether I close my eyes to them or not, they exist. I might get afraid of my grand privilege, I might waste my energy and my time wondering how I can meet this circumstance or that, how I can fulfill my duty here or there. But Almighty God, when He permitted

me to become a priest, He knew all this and He simplified it for me and for any other priest. He placed before me an ideal, an ideal that is really and truly a man as I am with the ways and the reactions of a man. He was the first Priest, He is the perfect Priest, the perfect Mediator between God and men. All I have to do to fulfill perfectly my duties now in 1944 as a priest is to keep my eyes always on my ideal.

My dear people, the simple soul and spirit of my vocation as a priest is to reproduce for men of my time the qualities and characteristics and the selflessness of my ideal: the great Priest, Jesus Christ. If I do that, I don’t have to worry in what circumstances I am placed, what duty is given me, what I shall do here or there or any place whatsoever. If I live and imitate and keep my eyes fixed on the ideal Priest, all these other things will be taken care of. That is my work, my dear people, twenty-four hours of each day, to strive with all my heart and soul to reproduce for men the qualities of my ideal. And, my dear people, I assure you that I shall fail to do this unless I am a man of prayer. Prayer is the one way by which I can succeed.

Let us take another instance. Mary is the name of a girl that you or I or anybody might know. She is a member of a household, she is someone’s daughter, she is your sister. She, too, stands before many possible ways of fulfilling the purpose of her life; she chooses to become a nun. She feels that by becoming a nun she will best and most easily fulfill the one purpose of her life. She knows that her obligations are grave, here she realizes that her life is in one sense a severe one. She leaves father and mother, brothers and sisters. She leaves, you might say in a sense, her freedom. And why? To follow a life, to say the least, of self-denial and sacrifice. But here, too, the good God gives to this little girl an ideal that simplifies her life. For all she has to do is to imitate that ideal, to reproduce for her age the qualities of that ideal; and that real ideal is a real woman, Mary, the Blessed Virgin Mary. If she does that, she won’t have to worry about all the little angles of the religious life, these things she won’t have to worry about if she keeps her eyes on Mary, striving to put on the qualities of Mary - her kindness, her happiness, her nobleness. My dear people, this little girl will not be able to do this, though, without prayer.

The same thing can be said of a young boy who does not want to become a priest, who does not want to enter the marriage state. There is a life that he can follow - a life that is full of self-denial and sacrifice and so many other things; it is the life of a brother. But here, too, is a human man and a human ideal set up to imitate, and if he imitates him, he will be happy and will reach the goal for which every man is striving; that ideal is St. Joseph. But he won’t succeed, however, in reproducing the qualities of St. Joseph in himself without prayer.

Now we come to another way: the married state. The young man and young

woman feel that the best way that they can fulfill the purpose of their life is in the married state. My dear people, the sacrifice and the obligations and the duties of married life bring with them consequences that affect heaven and earth; the young man and young girl kneel down before the altar of God to make a solemn contract. You know what a contract is. This, however, is a most sacred kind of contract that any man and woman could ever make. In other contracts between two parties, there is only a little service or a little possession exchanged or given to each other. But in this contract that this boy and girl are about to make, there is something far different; they pledge themselves to each other - until one of them dies. Once that contract is over they are pledged to each other for life. There is no further choice.

As they kneel to make that contract, they are about to become cooperators with Almighty God to bring into this world persons. They form the shrine into which Almighty God infuses a soul that will never die. The children that they bring into this world they are obliged to educate, and that word “educate” means to develop them in body and in soul. On their bodies they have to put clothing and to feed them; and they must take care of their little souls, before priests and brothers and sisters they are likewise bound to feed, to develop, and to rear so that they will be not only good citizens of earth, but of heaven, as well, where they will have as companions the angels and the saints.

And incidentally, in the rearing of children who will become courteous, kind and generous and prayerful, the greatest help is an example in the father and in the mother. The greatest instrument to bring up a boy and girl and to make them courteous and kind and everything they should be as Christian boys and girls - those very qualities are seen by that boy and girl when they first open their eyes to the use of reason. Those very qualities of courtesy and kindness and of mutual help they will see in their father and in their mother, to that man and woman to whom was entrusted their helplessness. The duty of such a boy and girl who have made such a contract as this marriage is a hard duty and at times a trying one, and at all times a duty that calls for self-denial and sacrifice and patience.

The priest had only himself and his own soul to take care of; the sister had only herself to control, and likewise the brother. But here this young man and young woman have a double burden - their own and their partners, too, and not only that, but they have to bear with the patience of their state the characteristics and traits of their children; and vice versa, their children have to bear them. But to fulfill these obligations and carry on the burdens of married life, God has placed an ideal, a real human ideal, for families to imitate. God in His goodness has placed before every family an ideal human family to imitate. That ideal family was the first Christian family - it is the Holy Family. And I want to emphasize this fact to everyone listening to me now, that just as sure as my vocation is

to reproduce the great High Priest, to be another Christ for men of my age, so the vocation that is yours as a family is simply this: to reproduce for 1944, to reproduce in your parish and in your little city the Holy Home of Nazareth, to reproduce for your time the qualities, the harmony and obedience, the love, that respect that existed in your ideal home, the Holy Home of Nazareth.

You will not succeed in doing this without prayer, without family prayer. Why? Because this vocation does not pertain just to the mother and to the father, or the young man or young girl in your house, but to all as a whole. I assure you that you will not succeed without prayer. And of all the ways, and of all the prayers that you can possibly use to enable you to reproduce the holy human family, the Holy Home of Nazareth, once again prayer is needed, the Family Rosary is needed.

To live up to an ideal, you have to know that ideal, you have to love it. To live up to an ideal means you have to keep that ideal always before your eyes. You must never forget it. I told you what that ideal is. To know that ideal and to love it, you do not have to read volumes of books, you do not have to hear great sermons or lectures. God in His goodness has placed within your power and grasp a simple, easy means to know the Holy Family of Nazareth and of knowing how to live in your home and how to imitate that family and furthermore how to make up whatever differences may come inadvertently in your home, into your familyand that means is the simple Family Rosary. And why? Because the Rosary is nothing more than the story of the life of the Holy Family; or don’t call it holy if that word scares you, but simply call it the ideal family, or the human family that you have to imitate.

The Rosary is not just a repetition of Hail Marys, but it is also the unfolding before the eyes of the family that is saying it a glimpse into the life of that first Christian home. I want to be more specific. Twenty hundred years of triumphs and of piety in the hearts of men and women on earth have surrounded the members of that Holy Family with so much glory that we tend to place that family in a world beyond us altogether. But let us not forget that at the time they lived, especially at the time they lived in Nazareth, that to the people of their day they were not known as Jesus Christ, the Savior of men, the Son of God, nor as the great Blessed Virgin Mary or the great St. Joseph. Indeed not! To the people of their day, it was Mary, the wife of a poor man, a neighbor woman. It was Joseph, the husband of Mary, a hard-working man, a poor man at that. And it was Jesus, their Son - that is the way they were known to the people that lived in the city along with them.

Into that family’s life came real poverty, hard work, and severe, very severe humiliations, and, to say the least, intense pain and suffering. Angels did not come to do the work for Our Lady. She had to prepare meals and fix clothes

and sweep the house. And Joseph had to work to get food for that House; and Jesus, the Son of Mary, was hungry and had to be fed, and He wore His clothes out and they had to be fixed, and new ones had to be bought. The humiliations and sufferings they had to undergo can be imagined in your own way but just remember this: that when Jesus Christ was a baby, He and His Mother and His Foster Father had to flee for their lives. And finally, when they crucified Our Lord, His Mother stood at the foot of the cross on which He was nailed. And remember that she was not the mother of a great hero, of a great soldier; the glory of Mary was the glory of suffering and humiliation. Let us not forget that! Mary, on that day, was the mother of a criminal; and remember, too, that Mary’s heart was as human and capable of suffering as your hearts are.

But remember that through it all, these three lived and suffered together. Remember that once these three came together, there was courtesy and kindness and consideration for one another’s failings. There was obedience and love and happiness. They bore all the difficulties for God and for the work of God. And because they did the will of God and followed out that will of God’s throughout the days and throughout the years, no matter what that will determined they should bear, they are for us of today Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Redeemer of men, and that woman is the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven and of Earth, and Joseph is the great St. Joseph, the patron of the entire Church. Their reward for their holy and good life, for the life they lived on this earth, is the glory they have in heaven today, and the glory and the homage we give them today.

These are only some of the thoughts that the family that is faithful to the Family Rosary will gather, for the Rosary is only the story; it is the story of the family that it is your privilege to imitate.

My dear people,

Intimate Friendship with Mary

Tonight again I urge you for your own happiness to continue with the Daily Family Rosary, if you already have that devotion in your home; if you have not, then to resolve firmly to bring it into that home this night. The reason I will give you tonight is that the Family Rosary is one of the greatest means to bring home to your mind and your heart and to your own home what it means to have as a special friend of your family none other than the Blessed Mother Mary, Our Lady.

Tonight I will try, in a poor way at that, to bring home to you what a privilege it is for any person or any home to claim not the ordinary, but the intimate friendship of Mary. Who is Mary? Who is the Blessed Virgin Mary? Oh so theoretically we answer, but the sad possibility of missing the happiness and the joy as well as the importance and the holiness that are concealed in the formulary answers that some give to the question, “Who is Mary?” At this moment, some place, Mary exists. At this moment Mary exists in body and soul. She can walk, she can talk, she can smile; she has a heart that responds to friendship. At this moment she exists. She has eyes, she has ears, she has a heart - she has a heart and soul like you have. She is in heaven at this moment, but when we have said all this, we are only saying what we could say of many another woman, with the exception that no other woman is body and soul in heaven at this moment. Mary is in heaven. She is thoroughly and truly human, but yet there is no other person in heaven or on earth or another person that ever will exist except God Himself that is superior to Mary. Every person in heaven and on earth that has been born or shall yet be born except God Himself is inferior to Mary. In fact, all the angels and saints and holy people on earth together - all of them put together with all their perfections and goodness - all of them are inferior to Mary. Mary is the Daughter of God the Father; Mary is the Mother of God the Son; Mary is the Spouse of God the Holy Ghost. She is the Queen of the Angels; she is the Queen of All Men. She is the Queen of Heaven and the Queen of Earth. Mary is the Co-Redemptrix of the world. And what does that big word “Co-Redemptrix” mean? What does it mean to you, what does it mean to Mary or to any person who lives here, any person who loves her? I will try to tell you in a poor way. It will be far from the last word when I try to tell what it means to say that Mary is the Co-Redemptrix of the world.

It means this: that Mary played a great, great part in the saving of your soul, in the redemption of your soul, in the redemption of all men. The secret of our redemption is the cross. The cross and Calvary, however, did not take place without the Incarnation. The Incarnation means that God the Son took upon

Himself a body and a soul by which he could save men. And He asked the consent of Mary for that body and that blood by which he would save men. And Mary, that day she gave her consent, became the Mother of God. To become the Mother of God was a glorious privilege, but to become the Mother of the Redeemer was quite another thing. And that day when she gave her consent, she gave her consent not only to become the Mother of God, but also to become the Mother of the Redeemer of men.

And that means this: that she offered to the Son of God and gave to the Son of God from her own substance the very flesh and the very blood of hers, that flesh and blood that was to be humiliated, trampled upon, flayed and scourged, reviled and hated and destroyed. Unlike other men, Jesus Christ had no human father. His body and blood entirely came from the substance of His Mother. And not only did she give from her substance the body and blood that was to suffer so much for you and me, but at the Presentation in the Temple, she offered her Divine Child to God for you and for me. And at Calvary she stood at the foot of the cross offering up her Son for our salvation. The Co-Redemptrix of the world - and all the treasures of grace that her Divine Son won for men on that day on Calvary. Mary distributes now to men and so we call her the Mediatrix of all graces. And what does that mean?

It means only this: that every grace that I or anybody else will ever get comes to you and me and any other person because of Our Blessed Mother, because she prays for that grace for all of us. Mary, after God, is the only person in heaven or on earth that the devil fears most, and for two reasons: one of them, because of her power with God; the second, her love of men, who are her children. If she were powerful but did not have any love for us, the devil would not fear her. But he fears her because she uses that great power that she has to stand between us and him and his treacherous designs over us.

I want to summarize all these facts more emphatically by an illustration. Imagine two persons here on earth. One of them had always been a faithful friend of Mary; that person always loved her and was devoted to her. And she loved him. And then one day that person, at the instigation of the devil, had the misfortune to commit a frightful mortal sin. The other person was not so devoted to Mary. Oh, he said his Hail Marys and Holy Marys and so theoretically he gave her praise, but there was not that heartfelt friendship; he was more or less indifferent. But he was devoted to this or that or the other saint, let us say very intensely, in fact. Then one day, he, too, had the misfortune to commit this same mortal sin.

Now if all the angels and archangels, those spirits in heaven with all their holiness and their brightness and friendship with God, and if all the saints in heaven, apostles, martyrs, and virgins, and if all the holy persons that are on earth united

together and went to Almighty God to beg the grace of repentance for this last person, and Mary did not join with them - if they tried to win the forgiveness for this person without Mary - they would fail; that man would never be forgiven. But on the other hand, if the other person who had been devoted to Our Lady, if, for that person who had committed exactly the same mortal sin, not one of the angels or the saints interceded for him, if all stood aloof and would not raise their voices on his behalf - but if Mary alone went to the throne of our God to ask pardon for that child, immediately that grace of forgiveness would be given that child. This will show you in some poor way what it means when we say that there is no other person except God who is powerful and influential as is Mary. It will also show you in a way what is meant when we say that she is the Mother of God the Son, the Daughter of God the Father, and the Spouse of God the Holy Ghost.

These thoughts, however, will not bring home to us how close she is to us and how much she is one of us. She is without a doubt the most beautiful of all women. The qualities in this or that woman that you or I might have known, that in any way inspire us or excite our admiration - she has those qualities. She is the most intelligent of all women; common sense would tell us that, for the Son of God would have the most intelligent of women as His Mother. I have met women during the course of my life, and I have read about women in the course of my life, or I have seen women in pictures that have inspired me in such a way that I could not help but admire such women, such noble women, women who were kind and sacrificing and forgiving. Mary is nicer than those women. In fact, during the course of my years, these women have only helped to make my love for Mary greater, yes, and stronger.

I have looked for such qualities in the women that I have met to enable me to compare them with Our Lady, just to enable me to say that my Heavenly Mother is greater than they. And yet that grand person, Mary, is our Mother. Think of what it means that this great person of such majesty and of such power is your Mother. I have seen women, I have met women, whom such accidental circumstances as riches or authority have placed in a more or less high level, and I have some of these and I have been afraid of them. Their authority and their position affected them; it exalted them, so they thought, to such a degree that they were the superiors of others.

But in regard to this grand, lovely Mother of ours, great as she is in heaven, she loves us. And I mean by that word just what it should mean. She admires us, she thinks the world of us, and we need not be afraid of approaching her intimately. And let not poverty or hard work of littleness ever keep you from running to Our Lady and from loving her with all your heart, for you - perhaps more than the wealthy and those who do not know what it is to be poor and to work - you, perhaps, more than they have a greater claim on Mary, for her hands once knew

what hard work was, and her body knew what it was to have poor clothes and mended clothes, and she knew what it was to have poor food. But now I am coming to a particular supplication.

The Blessed Virgin Mary is not God. There is nothing divine in Our Lady; she is truly, perfectly human, with the ways of a human being, with the reactions of a human being. And if you look into your heart and I look into mine, we shall have to admit that in our lives there are many friends. But there is also this fact that we cannot deny that these friends do not all have the same degree of our affection. There are varying degrees of friendship, all the way from mere toleration up to particular intimacy. And this is what you will admit, and I, too: that those particular friends, those few that have won our particular friendship are the ones that have deserved it. They have earned it, they have returned our friendship. The one or two or three friends for whom I would go through fire and water are those that would do the same thing for me.

Our Blessed Mother, too, has many, many, many friends, but they vary in their degrees of friendship, all the way from mere toleration to particular intimacy, and I assure you of this: that this night, as I stand before you, those particular friends of Mary are those that have earned her friendship. They appreciate her friendship. They have returned her friendship. They have put themselves out for her. The great, great love she has offered them, they have accepted and offered her all the love that is in their hearts in return.

But Mary, grand and lovely person as she is, she wants all of us to be her particular, intimate friends. As you listen to me tonight, you need not feel sad that you are not one of these friends of Mary, for you can be and it is easy for you to be. Of all the words, of all the devotions, of all the prayers that most surely will reach the heart of Mary and that will most surely make of you and of your home particular friends of Our Lady, none can compare with the Daily Family Rosary. For when you practice this devotion, you are, and the members of your family are, using ten sacred minutes of each day during which your household will kneel at the feet of Mary and look into her face and by your action and words you are telling her that she is the grandest and loveliest and the best friend you have in heaven or on earth - after God!

Mary, Mother of the Redeemer

My dear people,

Tonight again, I urge you to bring the Family Rosary into your home and to keep it there. And if you have already begun that sacred, saving practice, make a resolution now that you will keep it always in your home. The reason I will give you tonight is simply this: that the holy Family Rosary is a key that opens your door to Mary; it is a key that will bring Mary into your home with all that she stands for.

Were I given the choice this minute of two possibilities, I would not hesitate one second to choose the second of the two. These are the possibilities. The first one: were I to have the choice of the intercession and the friendship and the favor of all the intellects, all the inhabitants of heaven and Purgatory and of earth except Mary praying for me, offering up their sufferings and their friendship and their powers with God for me, and that means more than you can imagine - the sufferings of the martyrs, the holiness of the virgins and the zeal of the apostles and these for all ages, yet if I had the choice of all these put together without Mary, I would reject all of them if I could get the second possibility - Mary, alone, praying for me. The friendship and the favor and the power of Mary alone would be of more value to me and would be of more value to obtaining the favors that I wanted than the combined prayers and sufferings and holiness and petitions of all the other inhabitants of heaven and of earth, this to show you the power of Mary. Now I want to lead you into this particular line of thought.

Our Blessed Mother has a great work today. Her work is that of her Son, just like any mother’s work is the work of her son. Mary’s work is to see that men and women, that all of us will get back to God safely, that we will save our souls, that we will be happy with God and with her forever. Her work is to see that you and that those whom you love avoid the pitfalls and the snares and the traps that the devil is preparing and has prepared for you. Like her Son, she does not waste words of actions. When she says something or does something or recommends something, she wants us to profit by those recommendations. She wants us to learn the lesson that she wants to give us. Whatever she recommends, it is precisely meant to help us save our souls.

What does she think about the Rosary? What does she think about the Family Rosary as a powerful means of saving our souls? What power has the Rosary with Mary? What power has the Family Rosary with Mary in winning for a home or a family or a man or a woman her friendship? What power has the Family Rosary to bring to the side of a family, to bring into the home of a family this Blessed Mother of God? Before I answer that question, I want to bring

before your mind three qualities in Mary that will put force and power in any recommendation that she will give to you.

I want you to keep always in mind these three qualities in Mary that support and give life and power to the recommendations that she has given to men, recommendations to use the Rosary, to use the Family Rosary. First of all, she is the most intelligent of all women. That is the first quality. We don’t have to have faith to bear this out. Just common sense would tell anyone that the Son of God would have for His mother the most intelligent of any women. So you know many intelligent women today with good judgment, with a great sense of values. Mary has greater intelligence than any of these; she has greater sense than all others, greater judgment. Consequently, when she recommends something, she has behind that recommendation a great intellect.

The second quality that adds considerably greater force to anything that she recommends is this: she has twenty hundred years of experience in seeing the triumph and the failure of souls and of homes. For twenty hundred years she has seen the warfare that souls have waged. From her place in heaven she has seen how varied and how suited to the varied temperaments of men and women are the traps and snares and the temptations laid for souls by the devil and his allies. For two thousand years she has seen how some men and women have fallen haplessly and helplessly into those traps. She has also seen how others have successfully avoided them. The means that were most helpful to aid them out of these traps once they have fallen into them - these, too, she has seen. In a word, for two thousand years Mary has seen how souls have been saved and how they have lost. So when she gives a recommendation to help a soul to save itself, she has the weight of experience behind her.

And the last and the greatest quality to put weight into the recommendation of Mary is this: that she is the Mother of the Redeemer of all men. And that means more than you can even imagine, for it was she who gave to the Son of God right from her own substance, the instrument by which alone He saved you and saved me. That instrument is His precious body and blood. Bear this in mind, that the Son of God, alone, could not make reparation to His Father for us because He was coequal to His Father. Had he not the body and blood that he received from the substance of His Mother made Him a real human being, inferior in that respect to His Father and a real brother of you and men, and so capable of speaking on behalf of us. Don’t forget the part that Mary played freely and willingly to make that possible. So in her position as the Mother of the Redeemer of men, what she recommends to save souls is the best.

Now in the light of these three qualities, if men and women come face to face with a recommendation of Mary and do not follow it out, to say the least those men and women are fools. Now has Mary recommended the Rosary? What

does she think about the Rosary? You can go back centuries and centuries and history will prove to you that the Rosary is her prayer, that of all the prayers the Rosary is hers. It has her preference. She has recommended it time and time again to men, and you don’t have to go back even one hundred years to see the emphasis that she placed on the Rosary, the Family Rosary.

Not one hundred years ago, she appeared at Lourdes to a little peasant girl on the mountainside. She did not come just for a social visit; she did come to teach a lesson, a lesson not just for the men of the territory there and for that particular time, but a lesson meant explicitly as well for you and for me and for 1944. That lesson had to do with the salvation of each of us, or with the helps and the means that would bring about our salvation. With these qualities that I have mentioned in Mary, she could have given a thousand ways for our salvation, a thousand means to help us. She might have recommended a pilgrimage to Rome, the reading of this or that particular book, but she rejected them all for one thing: the Rosary.

She appeared eighteen times, and during these eighteen times, not just one of them, or three of them or nine of them or fifteen of them, but the eighteen times she carried the Rosary beads with her as if to show to you and me and to say to you and to me and all of us: “This is what recommend to you to help you save your soul.” But she went further. During those eighteen times, not one of them or nine of them or seventeen of them, but the eighteen times she recited the beads in unison with Bernadette, and she was the center that attracted all those families that stopped there to recite the beads out loud together as if to say to you, “Not only do I recommend the beads to you as a great means of saving your soul, but I also, by my example, recommend to you the best way to say it, in union with one another, in a group, in a family, in your home.”

If you have seen the picture “The Song of Bernadette,” you will recall much more clearly what I am now about to tell you. From the first glimpse Bernadette had of Our Lady until the last, she was rapt in ecstasy. The loveliness and the presence and the happiness that surrounded Mary took Bernadette completely out of her senses. She was so enraptured with love for that beautiful person that spoke to her, that gave secrets of great intimacy to her, that she did not feel even the flame of a lighted candle touching her flesh. It was a sad, a terrible letdown for Bernadette when she would have to come back again to our earth here, when she would lose sight of Mary. And my dear people, if Bernadette could prevent having to come down to earth again, if Bernadette would have the key by which she would not have again lost the happiness of the presence of Mary, who among us would think that Bernadette would not use it?

But strange to say, Bernadette soon found out a key by which, if she could not keep Mary always before her, at least she could prolong and make sure that,

while she was using that key, Mary would be present; and she used that key. That key was the Rosary. There is no record that Mary left Bernadette in the middle of the Rosary and Bernadette caught on, and then she said the Rosary slowly, slowly so that she would have at least that much of a guarantee of the presence of Mary. But it was only Bernadette who knew that it was the Rosary that was keeping Mary there, keeping her looking down upon herself and having Our Lady smile upon her. But there were thousands and thousands of families there, and the key that kept Mary present for Bernadette was also the key that kept Mary invisibly present for the multitude of men and women who were there with Bernadette. Every time and as long as the Rosary was being recited, Mary was there. They did not see her, but she saw them. She was well aware of their presence. In fact, she looked upon them and spoke to Bernadette about one of them.

The same key that kept Mary present for Bernadette kept her present also for those crowds of men and women and children. My dear people, the same key will open your door to Our Lady today. Do not close your door to her. Use the key that will bring her surely into your home. You have the key; open the door and Mary will walk as smilingly and as beautifully into the presence of your room as she came into the presence of Bernadette and the people of her day. May she bless you when she comes.

Mary in our Home

My dear people,

Last night I ended with the thought that the Daily Family Rosary was the key to bring none other than the Mother of God into your very home. And what does it mean to you or to any home to be assured that the guest in that home

is Mary? It is a shame that when we have to try to explain to another in words what it means to say that Mary, the Mother of God, is a guest in this or that home, in your home. But because we are made of flesh and blood, we have to use the means and the words that flesh and blood can understand. It would be far better to close one’s eyes and keep away from outside distraction and then realize just what is the value and the honor and the assurance that would come to the home where the Blessed Mother of God lives. In the Scriptures there is very little of the story of Mary.

One sentence in that holy story, however, would be enough for us. It is the sentence that tells that Mary is the Mother of Jesus Christ. And notice in that story, very, very short story as it is, the great importance that is placed on family life, that families, that homes play in that short story of Our Lady’s life. There are three families, and common sense adds a fourth under whose roofs Mary lived and was entertained as a guest. There were four families whose roofs Mary used as a shelter for herself. Into every one of those roofs she brought the greatest gift of God, and besides she brought some particular gift to each one of them.

The first home was that of Zachary and Elizabeth. That old man and that old woman lived in a little hillside home. They had led a lonely life, and then one day they had a visitor who brightened up their home and their lives forever after. That man and woman opened their door to Mary, and the moment that her voice sounded in the doorway, two miracles happened. The day before Elizbeth could not tell whether the next day would rain or not, and now at the sound of the voice of Mary she becomes a prophet and foretells the future. The little infant in her womb leaps with joy because of the presence of his Savior who enters that doorway with Mary. And one second before the sound of Mary’s voice sounded, that little child was an enemy of God, but at the sound of Mary’s voice he was cleansed from original sin and became the herald of Jesus Christ for men. Oh, it is food for thought to think that when that old couple opened their door to Mary, they opened their door to God. It is food for thought to think that when Mary crossed over their threshold, God was present with her. Wherever Mary went, into whatever home she went, God was present with her.

The second family under whose roof Mary stopped did not invite her, did not, in fact, know that she was under their roof. But there is no doubt that that family that owned the stable where our Lord was born would have refused Joseph had he asked them for the use of the stable that night. That stable was owned by some family and that is the one family in the whole world that could say it was under its roof that the Savior of the world was born. My dear people, just think of what some families missed the night before when they closed their doors to Our Lady, when they told Joseph that they had no room for Mary. And it is not wild imagination to think, it is sound common sense to believe that the Blessed

Virgin Mary with her little baby, the Son of God, left that little cave together and went to a little dwelling house, perhaps the home of one of the shepherds. And you can imagine in the early morning Mary passing by the several homes that refused her, that closed their doors to her the night before. And you can imagine that these people, as Mary and her Divine Son were passing by on the outside, were asleep in their beds, complacently at that. And wouldn’t it be an awful thing if our Blessed Mother looked down at the baby in her arms and said to Him, “Those people closed their doors to us last night.”

That new home that undoubtedly she went to was without doubt a poor home, because Mary and Joseph were of the poor class. But it was into that home perhaps that the kings of the east came with all their splendor and glory, and the people in that new little home saw the splendor and the glory of those kings who came to adore that little Child that Mary brought with her.

The last family was at the wedding feast of Cana. That couple invited Mary as a guest, wishing to share the happiness of their wedding day with Mary. As in the other instances, where Mary was, her Divine Son was there, too. That night, Mary, perhaps, was surely one of the guests who sat to be entertained, but undoubtedly she helped also to cook and to serve. And to save that couple that invited her and her Son, that opened their doors to her and her Son, to save that couple from a slight embarrassment - not the question of the loss of the state of grace, not a question of saving that home from enemies that were planning to ruin that home - no, it was only the question of a slight embarrassment, and for that purpose Mary asked her Divine Son to work a miracle before His time. And He did!

That was two thousand years ago, but our Blessed Mother is as gracious and as good and as receptive to friendship this day as she was then. Just as then, the homes that opened their doors to her opened their doors to God. Wherever she went, God was present. So the same today. Into whatever home she goes this day of ‘44, she brings God with her. The family of this day that will welcome Mary under its roof welcomes God also. And just as then, not only does she bring God, but she leaves besides a particular, special gift. My dear people, the way, the sure way by which you can open your doors to Mary this day of ‘44 is by the Daily Family Rosary. Of all the family prayers, of all the family devotions that you can think of, none reaches the heart of Mary more surely than her prayer, her preferred prayer, the Rosary.

My dear people,

Mary Can Save Us

Again with all my power I urge you to bring into your home the Family Rosary and keep it there. I shall try to give you a reason for this tonight. The first and the only major defeat of the human race took place in Eden. The first and great and only victory of the human race took place on Calvary. There is the secret of our deliverance from the tyranny of the devil. But Calvary or the cross did not take place without the Incarnation, and the Incarnation is simply this: that the Son of God became man, took upon Himself the human nature, body and soul like ours, by which he could redeem or buy back from the power of the devil the human race, and by which he could ennoble man who had lost his dignity. He did not become man, however, without asking the consent of Mary, and the instrument by which He redeemed us, that is His Body and Blood came from the substance and the consent of the Mother of God. And that day when she said “Yes” to the question of the angel, she was speaking on behalf of all of us.

I want you to bear this in mind, that the spokesman for us on that day was not President Roosevelt, or Napoleon, or Caesar, or any of the great statesmen or any of the great women that we know of in history. God did not ask any of these people to speak for us. When the plans were made, when the plans were being fashioned to save the human race, these people were not good enough; the only one worthy to enter into those plans and speak with God and speak for all men was Mary. She was the best of all, and the reason for her greatness and the greatness of any man or woman is because of closeness to God. On that day when God asked her consent to the Incarnation, she was of all the creatures closest to God.

But just as that consent was the final act in the plan of the Incarnation, and just as that consent placed Mary in the position of spokesman for the human race, so that consent will ever make her the understanding mother that she is, the intermediary between Christ and men. Through her came the graces necessary for all of us. Christ came to us through her, and we can only go back to Christ through her. And this thought cannot be overemphasized - how the love of God for men is shown in this providence, that He who would place Mary as the only person in heaven or on earth by whom all the rest of us would come back to Christ.

We love God as our Father, we thank Him for His mercy, but we are afraid of His justice. We admire and love our Savior who was so good for us as to die for us, but we dread Him also as the Judge. But in regard to Mary, we have no fear. Just as any child has no fear for his mother, so we have no fear of Mary. In Mary there is only the fullness of love and of mercy and of pity and of pardon for us, and

she will always be that way for us; no matter how high we reach, no matter how low we fall, Mary will always mean the fullness of mercy and forgiveness for us. And history has shown her to be just this: the mother that always loves us, that always helps us and that will always stand between her children and harm. Several times throughout the course of history the human race has come to the brink of disaster. Several times the human race has wandered to the brink of ruin. Seven hundred years ago this happened; five hundred years ago this happened; three hundred years ago this happened; one hundred years ago this was beginning to happen for our age, and twenty-seven years ago it happened; and twenty-one years after that catastrophe it happened again to us. During these particular crises in civilization, men and women had different names for the different things that brought that about: Albigensianism, Mohammedanism, Nazism, socialism, communism, modernism. But notice that in all of these different names stood for and signified one and the same spirit; that spirit was the devil. That spirit took on different names, but no matter what the names or no matter when he brought civilization to a crisis, his object in all this was exactly of the same nature, and it was this: to take every man and woman and home and to take from it the most precious treasure that it had: its faith.

My dear people, I want you to think very deeply on this matter. The most precious treasure that a man has is his faith, but like so many other things we take it for granted. Like so many other precious treasures God has given us, they are only words to us until we lose them. A man’s health, for instance, is only a word until he loses it. Hearing is only a word until a man or a woman loses it. But faith, faith, too, for so many is only a word until a man or a woman loses it. And when a man or a woman or a nation loses its faith, it has lost the most precious treasure that man could get on this earth. It is that faith that puts stamina in a man or woman, that gives them the courage and the fortitude to bear the events, the trials of life. Without it, man has only the appearance of a man; his is like a man put together with flour-paste. And this precious gift the devil almost succeeded in taking from men during these great crises in the history of civilization; that is what we mean when we say that the devil almost brought disaster on the human race. Yet this is too theoretical, it is not bringing home to you clearly enough what I mean.

Seven hundred years ago, the forces of evil then almost took from man his faith, almost took from man belief that God exists, belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, belief that Jesus Christ loves us and lived in the Blessed Sacrament, belief that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the Mother of God. This force of evil tried then and almost succeeded in taking from man that soul which will live forever, and that marriage is a sacrament, that marriage is sacred, that family life is a holy life and that the home [is] established and blessed not by human hands but by God. It tried to break up the home and it tried and almost succeeded in

driving from man belief and conviction that a man is only a man when he is virtuous, that he ceases to be a man when he ceases to be virtuous, and that means more precisely this, that a man is only a man when he is pure, when he is just - when he can walk the streets with his head high. That, my dear people, is some illustration when I say that faith is a most precious treasure; and this treasure the devil and the forces of evil almost took from man, and this same treasure five hundred years ago he almost took from man, and one hundred years ago and twenty-one years ago and now again in our own day he almost succeeds in taking from man.

Right now I am not interested in answering the question why the forces of evil rushed man to such a crisis in these different ages. That is not the point I am trying to meet here. I will only say that reason is this: it is the same reason as the reason why you could go out of this church tonight and look into a garden that should have been full of flowers in full bloom but you would see instead a garden choked and full with briars and thistles and weeds. The reason is because the gardener neglected it. And so the same reason is the reason why the forces of evil can rush and carry man to the brink of ruin; they do not do that overnight, like mushrooms grow, but for years and years and years they go forwards because men and women neglect their garden. But as I said, this is only incidental.

The point I want to bring home is this: that in every one of these crises, our Blessed Mother, Mary, who since her childhood has pledged herself to humanity, has come to stand between man and ruin. And, my dear people, this is what I want to emphasize, that invariably in all of these crises, she held out to us one and the same weapon for men to defend themselves, to save themselves; and that weapon was the Rosary. As if to show us that this Rosary stands for herself! So whoever uses the Rosary uses not just a string of beads but uses the power of the Mother of God. The Rosary stands for Mary, who holds the Rosary not just [as] a chain of beads, but [as] the symbol of Mary herself! And I want to show you again that seven hundred years ago, and five hundred years ago, and three hundred years ago men triumphed, in each case Mary appeared and gave the Rosary and showed men that by means of the Rosary they could save themselves and men triumphed, family life and human life were saved, precisely because they took from Mary the means that she offered them, the Rosary, because they used the means that she gave them; that is why civilization was saved in those past crises. But now let us come to our own age and see whether we have failed to take from her hands the weapon that will alone save us.

Ninety-five years ago, she appeared on earth. In this apparition she was crying, and to the children to whom she appeared she gave a message, and through them to the rest of men, that unless men changed their ways of life, unless they

amended their lives, she could not hold back much longer the angry hand of her Son. That was at La Salette ninety-five years ago. But men did not take heed of the warnings of their mother.

Sometime later she came again, this time at Lourdes, and there appeared eighteen times. Seventeen of those times, she was happy, smiling, spoke joyously; but one of those times, sadness came over her face as she looked out over the grotto, and then it was that she offered a suggestion to men to drive from the life the causes of her sadness, and she gave the suggestion, and it was this: to do penance. Penance, penance, penance; three times she repeated it. And how great was the cause that demanded this penance! But men went their ways and refused to pay heed to her second warning, and so we come to twenty-seven years ago. And for the third time, she came again to earth to warn men. My dear people, the patience of heaven can sometimes be exhausted. My dear people, the patience of a mother can come to an end. The Lord may save us if this is the last time she will appear to us to tell us what to do.

From May until October, she appeared in 1917, the third year of the last world war. She left a message every one of those months for men. She left no doubt as to the means by which men could actually bring that last world war to an end; she left no doubt about the means that men could use to save themselves from the forces of evil that had brought the human race through all these crises to the brink of ruin. The means that she gave was the Rosary. One month after another, her message was the Rosary. In fact, the salvation of one of the children she appeared to seemed to depend on the Rosary; not only that, these children she appeared to had the custom of saying the Rosary together in a group every day, and she told them to continue to do so. That, however, is incidental. She told them then that if men did not heed her warnings in 1917 and follow out her suggestions, that before many years another world war worse than that would come down upon men. It has come. But her suggestions are the same today as in 1917, at Lourdes and La Salette.

Mary can save us from all the powers of evil that are threatening us today. Secondly, she wants to save us. Thirdly, she will if we follow out her suggestions. During the one hundred years that I have just mentioned, she has left to us three recommendations, and these three recommendations of Mary are perfectly carried out and fulfilled by the Daily Family Rosary. Her three recommendations are these: penance, amendment of life, and the Rosary. They are perfectly fulfilled in the Daily Family Rosary, for the Family Rosary is one of the surest guarantees that all within that family, beneath that roof, will say the Rosary every day. Secondly, it is a daily act of penance, because fidelity to the Daily Family Rosary will demand inconvenience, self-denial, and sacrifice on the part of every member in that home. And lastly, after the Mass and the Sacraments, there is no greater force for bringing about an amendment of life, not just in one

individual, but in the members of a home. The home that practices the Daily Family Rosary cannot live in habitual mortal sin; they will have to get rid of either one or the other. Not only is the Family Rosary one of the most powerful means for bringing about an amendment of life, it is an amendment of life for the home that practices it.

My dear people, let this not be just theory. Do not sit back in your easy chairs and complain about the leaders who made the Treaty of Versailles and failed. Do not sit back in your chairs and do a lot of wishful thinking after the present war ends. Do not just talk about the best plans for the leaders of our country. I have given you the best plan and I want to bring it home to you, that it is not for anybody else to follow out this plan - it is for each one of you to follow it out.

Keep the Rosary in Your Home

My dear people,

I have asked you to bring the Family Rosary into your home and to keep it there. I want to urge you again to do so and to assure you that as far as I am concerned, as long as God gives me breath, this will be the message I shall have for you: to bring the Family Rosary into your home and to keep it there.

That is the purpose of my sermons, the purpose of my writings, the purpose of my prayers - to offer the Mother of God and the mother to whom my heart goes out an America that she can be proud of, an America that she can be proud to be queen of, an America that she can look down upon and see that the Daily Family Rosary is a permanent practice throughout the length and the breadth of its boundaries.

One of the great means of success is to sell myself and my convictions to all the men, women, and children that I can ever reach, and if I can do that, it will not be long before the Family Rosary comes back, because those leaders will, in turn, sell themselves to their people, and then the Family Rosary will spring not from a written pledge on a piece of paper but from the heart that is convinced - convinced of how necessary it is, how much praise it can give to God and to Mary. It will spring from conviction.

And in preaching to people to urge them to say the Family Rosary, I do not come apologetically and say it would be a grand thing for you to do this, it would be a

lovely old-fashioned custom to practice. Oh no, that is not my attitude, not the impression to take from what I say; please do not get the impression that you are doing something extraordinary when you take the Family Rosary into your home. Do not get the impression that you are making God a debtor, that you are doing something heroic. I do not hesitate to tell any of you that you are not worthy of the privilege to say so glorious a prayer as the Family Rosary. That is my attitude. There is not a home in this world today worthy of the honor of having Mary as its guest, of opening its doors to Mary. Only God is greater than Mary, Mary the Daughter of God the Father, the Mother of God the Son, the Spouse of God the Holy Ghost.

But Mary loves us so much and she is so gracious that she wants us to bring her into our homes. She wants us to open our doors to her. My dear people, that is the key that opens them: the Family Rosary. And can I sustain this claim? Certainly. And all the claims that I have ever made, they can be sustained. Not only history will support what I have said, but the very end of the prayers of the Rosary. Two thousand years ago, twelve men walked with our Blessed Lord on earth. If any twelve men or if any group of men could feel that they did not have to worry any more, that they did not have to feel uneasy about the future, that they did not need further instructions or safeguards, surely those twelve men were they. For three years they walked, they talked, and they slept with the Son of God. They listened to secrets of conversations that none of the rest of us have ever heard or will ever hear. Surely they, above all men, could feel independent and secure in their journey to eternity.

And yet one day these twelve men gathered around our Lord and said to Him: “Tell us how we should pray when we want something,” and then they heard for the first time on earth the words of the Our Father. My dear people, the first man on earth to utter that prayer was the Son of God. The first men to ever hear it on earth were the Apostles. So the family saying that prayer in the Rosary is a privileged group, for they are saying the prayer that for the first time on this earth was uttered by Our Lord, and for the first time on the earth was heard by the Apostles.

The second prayer, the Hail Mary, is not a prayer; it is an act of praise and of admiration and of love of a heart that comes face to face with the excellence of Mary. The first person to burst forth in this song - “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women” - was the archangel. And remember that when he was speaking these words of praise to Mary, he was speaking for another; he was acting as ambassador for the Blessed Trinity. And the first one to ever listen to these words of praise was Mary herself. And now

your family two thousand years away recites the Family Rosary, and they have the great honor and privilege of being united in mind and heart and soul as they repeat for fifty-three times that act of praise to Mary that was first uttered by the archangel speaking on behalf of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

The last prayer, the Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, you have the privilege to offer an act of adoration to God. It is the prayer that the spouse of Christ, the Church, has made her very own. And the Apostles Creed that contains the expressions and the great treasures of our faith - for that creed, men and women have laid down their lives. For that prayer and all that it stands for, men and women were burned at the stakes; they were tarred, tied up, and then taken out around the city and stuck up on poles and set on fire to illuminate the city. And they did all this for the truths contained in that prayer, and that those truths would be brought down to you. And your family saying the Family Rosary now has the privilege of repeating that prayer that has cost so much, that has cost such a price - the blood of the lives of men and women - and more than all that, the life of Jesus Christ! So, my dear people, instead of apologizing in asking you to do something or giving you an idea that you are doing something extraordinary in doing this, my thought is that you are not worthy to sing this grand song: the Daily Family Rosary.

My dear people, I have been asking for so long to bring the Family Rosary into your home. It would not be fair for me to stand here on the altar and place such a challenge before you and to ask you to accept it without being aware of the difficulties that you face in doing this. So I will try to place myself in your position, in your place, in your condition and see how I would answer the difficulties, how I would surmount the difficulties that would try to stop me from bringing the Family Rosary into my home.

Such objections as these will surely rise in the mind of families: “We are never home together; it is impossible to gather us together for ten minutes to say the Family Rosary. How would we start it?” The mother or daughter might say, as the father might say, too: “I would be ashamed to ask them, they would think that I am getting very holy all of a sudden. It is impractical in our house. I could never get my brothers; they would say that it is an old-fashioned, pietistic devotion. I could never get my children; they would laugh at me if I suggested it. Say, what do you think we are, monks or nuns?”

Oh, there are a thousand other objections that you will think of, but all these, however, are only the surface ones. There is one real reason. You had better

come face to face with it, because it is the real reason: a lack of faith. Weak faith! And what I mean by that is this: that there is not in our hearts or, let us say, in the hearts of all the members of a family, that deep awareness of whom God is or what God means to this family, how dependent upon Him every member of this family is for every second of their lives. By this weak faith I mean a lack of that consciousness of the part that Mary, our Blessed Mother, the Mother of God, plays in the happiness and the salvation of the members of a home. And a lack of awareness and consciousness of the power of the Rosary that faith and reason and history can prove. What is the reason for this lack of awareness and consciousness and thoughtfulness unless it be that the material things that we can touch and see and hear - the great material comforts and possessions that we enjoy in this country dull our awareness to the spiritual values and have taken our senses and our imagination from those spiritual to keep them engrossed and fastened on those material things, those tangible things in our home and in our community. Such things as the radio and the automobile, the theater, entertainments of one kind or another - dances, dates, and all these material things tend in the course of the years to deaden our consciousness to the real values: God, Mary, family life, and the power of the Rosary.

History has shown that the power of these material things have especially grown during the late 90s and all through our own century. And because of these things, people have gotten away from family prayers. Because family prayers would interfere with the wishes and the selfishness that these things have developed in man. As a result of these material things people have gotten away from family prayer, they have no enthusiasm for them; in fact, things have reached such a stage that people look upon family prayers as something extraordinary, something to be used only by very holy people, very old-fashioned people, and have come to the stage where they look upon the recitation of the Family Rosary as something unnatural. And when family prayers went out, when the Family Rosary went out, you have produced the situation that I have described before, a weakening of the consciousness and the awareness and the convictions of whom God is and who Mary is and how necessary these convictions must be for any home, how necessary prayer is for homes, how necessary the Family Rosary is.

Thus at the bottom, the real reason for objections raised up against the Family Rosary is the weakening of faith. You can hem and haw but I don’t hesitate to say that the man or woman who are the father and mother of children, and children who have a real conviction about God and Mary and home life would not hesitate for a second to say the Family Rosary. Well, let us face the facts

and see what we can do about it now. Well, circumstances in your particular home, the particular temperaments of your family will have to be considered in making the start. You may not succeed, and very likely you will not succeed in getting all the members of your family together at once the first time you ask them to carry out and fulfill faithfully the Family Rosary program day after day. But you can break the ice by getting at least one member of the family, and you two can say it together to bring the others in, and finally you will have all of them practicing this devotion with you.

If you who are listening to me and have convictions tonight, and if you are brave enough to live up to them, I do not hesitate to say that you will succeed in bringing the Family Rosary into your home. You will succeed in getting at least one other member of your family to say it with you. The reason I am so confident in this: that you have God with you, and secondly, if you are sincere and are determined to do your best, you can be sure that Mary will do the rest for you. She will inspire you with the means that will win all the members of your family to your way of thinking and to the way of the Family Rosary.

Pick out the time that is most suitable. I don’t care if you don’t get down on your knees together; if you say it at the end of the evening meal, at a time when immediately after the dessert you would talk all together to each other or wash the dishes. That would be a good time to say the Family Rosary. My next suggestion is that you don’t add a lot of trimmings to it. That is one reason why it has been thrown out of many homes. Do not defeat the purpose by adding your own private prayers. Demand only the Family Rosary of the other members. If you want to pray privately, go ahead, but don’t demand that others go along with you.

Another suggestion: don’t be carried away by the enthusiasm of a beginner and by the novelty of a beginner. It will grow hard and then you will lose the fervor of the beginner, but there is where you can make capital for yourself and your home by perseverance. And all these other objections you can answer briefly by realizing that if it is too hard to ask the family to go down on their knees for ten minutes, then how do they explain away the fact that the worldly spirit they have served so long and so well has demanded of them in return to arm and put uniform on their sons and to send them out to kill and be killed.

If the man of the house considers it a sissy thing to kneel with the rest of the members of the family and pray, tell him that many others thought the same thing until they came face to face with death; then they were mighty glad to go down on their knees together and save themselves. This world war has thrown

that stupid notion out of the minds of many a great man. And ten minutes! It is a sad home that all the members of the family are not together for ten minutes out of twenty-four hours. People should be ashamed to use this as a reason; they would be ashamed to use it, if they only knew what it implied. Ten minutes out of twenty-four hours not together. Oh, there are many other answers, but all I say is this: that those of you who have begun it, I ask you to persevere in it in spite of all the difficulties. If you do, you will never regret this in heaven or on earth. It will be one of the greatest resolutions that you have made on earth. If you have listened to me all this time and I have not moved you and you won’t bring this Family Rosary into your home, then for you I have only this to say: there are two ways of reaching an end - the easy way and the hard way. God has an end in view for each of you. He wants you to reach that end. He will do everything so that you will reach that end. I have offered you this nice and easy way to reach it. You have refused. All I can say now is this: when you learn the hard way, then do not complain!

Father Patrick Peyton and the Little Sisters of the Poor

The Little Sisters of the Poor throughout the world were great friends and benefactors of Father Peyton. He experienced love and hospitality in their homes and their devotion to him continued throughout his life and to his dying days.

Father Peyton lived out his last years at the Jeanne Jugan Residence in San Pedro, California. As his health declined it was an ideal place for him. On June 2, 1992, when he was unable to finish praying the Rosary the Little Sisters kindly told him that they would finish it for him.

He died in the early morning of June 3 and his final words were, “Mary, my Queen, my Mother”. The Little Sisters kept his room as it was for the next 30 years.

We offer this special homily from January of 1957 as a bonus to this collection which Father Peyton shared with the Sisters he loved so very much.

Dear Mother Provincial and dear Mother Superior, and all who will hear these words that I’ll now say, in God’s Holy Name, and on behalf of God, to any girl that may hear me. May God help me to reach the heart of any girl, Ann, Mary, Katherine, or whatever your name may be. I speak to you, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, a girl on whom God has lavished His friendship by giving you, dear Mary or Agnes or Katherine, the gifts that make you the beautiful girl that you are. The smile that you have, the face that you have, the eyes that you have, the voice that you have, the memory that you have, the imagination that you have, the intelligence that you have, and all the powers of body and soul that you have – one only Dear One gave them to you, Our Holy God. I’m His priest and because of this privilege that He has given, I have the right to speak for Him. In His name I’ll offer myself as an excuse, to reach you, to help you make up your mind, as to the road that you will walk on for the rest of your life. What vocation will you follow? What destiny will you do everything in your power to reach? May the words I’ll say help you.

If your vocation, your calling, is to become a wife, that will enable some dear man, your husband, [to] become a saint. If your holy vocation and calling is to become a wife that will be a saintly mother of little sons and daughters, who will also be saints because of your own sanctity, may these words give you the courage to pursue that holy vocation of wifehood and motherhood. Without mothers there would be no saints, without mothers there would be no priests

or sisters to work in our dear Lord’s vineyard. If your inclination and your wishes and your longing is to become the mother of children, congratulations, and may God help you to become a mother that, by your sanctity, by your queenliness, by your great sensitiveness to your God, you will make the children that you have bow before you in imitation, so that they too will become the great saints of tomorrow.

But dear Mary, Katherine, Agnes, if your inclination is to work for God completely, and not to share your beautiful self with anyone but the Incarnate God, if your inclination is, if your tremendous sensitiveness is so great that you wish to give yourself entirely to your Incarnate Master, and Lord, and Life, and Love, and Hope, then may these words encourage you to go all the way and not stand on the fence, not knowing the way to go.

I am living now, as I’m writing these few words to you, in a holy place. I’m living in the house of the Little Sisters of the Poor, on Sheffield Avenue in Chicago. For three weeks about, I have had the privilege of being welcomed here. Here I have been inspired; I have been spiritually enriched; I have received overwhelming spiritual riches from living in the home that those dear little Sisters make for God’s old people.

I want to tell you two stories that I have come face to face with in this holy house. One of them is one of the old people. The Little Sisters call their old people their guests. Most of you know who those old people are. They are the poor; they’re God’s destitute ones, perhaps, and where they find no other home, they find their home, and a real one, with the Little Sisters. They find the home of God with the Little Sisters. That’s why the Little Sisters have come into existence, that’s their reason for existence – to provide a home for God’s poor who have no other home – and to provide a home like God’s Little Sisters would provide, a home where there’s peace, a home where the Blessed Sacrament is, a home where there is love, a home where there is such cleanliness, because its run and protected by the Little Sisters that are dedicated to their God, and using this labor of love, this dedication, this ministry to the poor and to the destitute, and to those who have no other home to go to, to sanctify themselves.

Those precious Little Sisters who, like yourselves, yesterday were somebody’s daughters, somebody’s sisters, and too, perhaps, were on the fence like you, not knowing what to do. Then, the beautiful pull and the attraction, the appeal, to see Christ in an old man, to see Christ in an old woman, that has no place else to go, make that little girl of yesterday become the Little Sister of today, using

that labor and dedication as a means, too, for her own personal sanctification and destiny, which is union with her God, with her Creator, with her Life, with her Happiness, with her Incarnate God, Jesus Christ.

Here I came across two stories: one of them was one of the old men, in fact he wasn’t very old, he would be a little over fifty. I met him here three weeks ago today. His name is Tommy Carty, and he is from County Westmeath in Ireland.

A few days after I had met him, he pulled out of his wallet a photograph. When I looked at that photograph, it was a tremendous sermon for me. Let me attempt to explain what I mean. My purpose is to help you make up your mind about giving your entire life to our Lord.

Tommy was born to a mother who loved God, who loved her husband, who loved the little children that God wished her to have. That dear noble woman, when she got the gift of Tommy from heaven, she was determined that she would spare no effort to return that gift to the Giver, as a saint. In her holy home, prayer was known; in the holy home where Tommy was born, the father and the mother, and the sons and daughters, gathered together and said the things that the Rosary filled their house with. This was a normal thing every day, because that dear mother wanted to make her husband, her children, and herself pleasing and satisfying to their great God. Every night they gathered to say - “I believe in God the Father Almighty, that he is the Creator of heaven and earth, and I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord” - and “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” - and “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us” - and “Glory be to the Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost.”

Night after night from Tommy’s home those were the sounds that rose to the roof, that filled the walls, that filled the heart of Tommy and his brothers and sisters. And so Tommy reached his First Communion, Confession, and Confirmation day. When he grew to be a man of twenty-one or twenty-two, he decided to leave his father and mother and come to America to earn his living. He came to New York, and there worked in the subways. Tommy was about six feet, or close to six feet tall, a man of great build. As he worked in New York, he went to the place where his will wished him to go. He had the strength to go where his will wanted him to go, for he had great security in his strength. He had control of the earth in his strength, but if Tommy ever knew, in those days in New York, what tomorrow would bring, he would have been afraid to face it. In everyone’s life, in your life, too, dear Mary, Katherine, or Agnes, tomorrow will

bring the great crisis. No one can escape it; it’s the way home. Tommy came to his crisis when he moved from New York to Chicago.

In Chicago, also, he worked for years, where he was still sure and certain of himself. Then one day he’s brought to a hospital; sickness creeps upon his body, and the doctor’s verdict is - and Tommy was obliged to hear that verdict - “We will have to cut off one of your legs at the knee.”

The operation took place and the leg was taken off. Some month later, the doctor came back to pronounce a second verdict, and his other leg came off, too. Tommy was now left with his head and shoulders and body and no legs.

The photograph that I mentioned to you a while ago was a photograph of Tommy in his height. He was playing an accordion, and beside him was a lady violinist. Behind them, supporting the picture, were studio characters, to feature Tommy as the great star. I saw that picture, and in it a man of almost six feet, and then I looked down and saw beside me, sitting on a little box, Tommy without his legs. When those two legs were cut off, had Tommy been trained differently than his mother had trained him, he probably never would have been able to take that holy cross. Even when he had his training, he could have broken under that severe cross. He could have turned away, he could have challenged his God. He could have blasphemed his God. He could have shouted, “Why this?” But God and God’s beautiful watchfulness over his creatures, or rather his little boy and his little girl, and his old man, and his old woman, does not have to be taught. God’s watchfulness is great. We call it His providence. When the cross came to Tommy, God had prepared a Simon to carry it with him, just as a Simon had helped His own Son on the road to Calvary. Who was this Simon for Tommy? The Little Sisters of the Poor.

You cannot speak theoretically and be forceful. I want to symbolize the Little Sisters of the Poor so that they won’t be vague, but real, concrete people like you, dear Mary, who is now listening. I want to symbolize the Simon that our dear God gave to Tommy Carty by telling you the story of the Little Sister of the Poor in this Sheffield home in Chicago that is in charge of the men’s wards and floors. She’s the one that is the Simon that has brought it about that Tommy, far from being unhappy, far from complaining, far from resenting the wishes and the will of the great, lovable, holy God, has carried the cross and is carrying the cross valiantly, singing his way to heaven. Who is this Little Sister that I’m now going to personalize?

Shortly after Tommy Carty was born in Ireland, the providence of God brought it about that another little child was born also in Ireland, in another county. It was Donegal. The other child was a little girl. She too was born to a mother who was a holy wife, who was the helping hand to her husband, so that he also would become a saint. This little girl was born to a mother who appreciated a child from God, a mother who was determined that she would do everything in her power to hand back the girl that she got to the Giver as a saint. This little girl was one of fourteen children that her holy mother and father welcomed from the hands and wishes of our holy God.

The great mother and father of that little girl were determined to help her be happy, and very happy. They were determined that they would put God in that little girl’s soul, and they would gladly pay the price. So their home, like Tommy’s home, was a home of prayer. In that home there were two family rosaries a day. As I told you, she was one of fourteen, and that meant that the oldest of that long line of children would be full grown while some of the others were going still to school. At eight o’clock each night the custom was, in that home in Donegal, that the oldest child in school would gather the other of the school children and say the Rosary. They called that the “Small Rosary,” or the “Wee Rosary,” as they say in Scotland, meaning small. Again at ten o’clock at night, the great father of that family gathered all who were awake to say the Family Rosary, or the “Big Rosary.” On Sundays, when the mother and the father brought the older ones to Mass, the one left at home to mind the little ones would gather them at the order and suggestion of their great parents, while Mass was going on, and again say the Rosary. On Sunday, therefore, there were three Rosaries.

That was the home where God was raising up a girl that would be so sensitive to God, so refined, so alert to God, as aware of seeing God in her neighbor that she would in later life be the Simon to carry the cross with Tommy when both his legs were cut off.

She’s the one I’m holding up to symbolize the Little Sisters of the Poor, because when she was seventeen years of age, she saw God in her neighbor to such a degree that she became a Little Sister of the Poor. She was a postulant, novice, and finally a professed. She was then sent to America. I met her in the same house that I met Tommy Carty. Tommy the invalid carrying the cross - a heavy one - Sister, the Simon, with her graciousness, with her sensitiveness to her God, with her queenliness, with her smile, with her kindness, carrying the cross for Tommy and for a hundred other Tommy’s.

This is a story of a Little Sister of the Poor. This is a story of one of the ones that the Little Sisters of the Poor take care of. I’m offering this story to you, to you dear girls who are listening or reading. Think and feed on this. Feed much on this, and may these few words be a comfort to you. May they be a help to you, may they be a [unintelligible] for our dear God, with His peace, with His quietness, with His affection, with His love to reach your minds and hearts, dear little girls to whom He gave so much - your eyes, your smile, your face, your beauty, your walk, your poise, your dignity, your memory, your imagination, your intelligence, your heart. May you give them back to Him with generosity, serving Him in a thousand Tommy Carty’s that are waiting for you.