Hermana Lucía, San Luis MºGrignon de Montfort y San Pio X sobre el rosario y la fe

Sister Lucy has often recalled that the Rosary, in our “times of diabolical disorientation”, is a “powerful way of helping souls to preserve faith, hope and charity. There are people who do not know how, or are simply unable, to gather their thoughts and meditate. Ah well! the simple gesture of taking their Rosary to pray shows that they are mindful of God, and when they recall, in each decade, a mystery in Christ’s life, they go over them again in their mind, and this act will preserve in their souls the gentle light of the faith, it will keep the wick burning, which would otherwise eventually go out. However, those who abandon the prayer of the Rosary and who do not take part every day in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass have nothing to feed their souls on; how could they not eventually lose their way, due to the materialism of earthly life?” The seer explains moreover that “in the Holy Rosary or chaplet is contained the entire wealth of God’s truths, or, to put it better, God’s revelation to men”.

Father José dos Santos Valinho, who was closely acquainted with Sister Lucy, his aunt, told me when I met him in Porto on 16 June 1999: “For her, if a priest says the Rosary every day, it is a sign of orthodoxy in his teaching.”

Such was already the conviction of Father de Montfort:

“Believe me, my dear brother in the Rosary, if you want to arrive at a high degree of prayer without any affectation and without falling into the illusions of the devil so common to people of prayer, say your entire Rosary every day, if you can, or at least a chaplet. You have already reached this point by the grace of God, if you want to be faithful to it and to grow in it with humility. Keep saying the Holy Rosary, for a soul that says its Rosary every day will never be formally heretical nor deceived by the demon; this is a proposition that I would sign with my blood.36”

Such thinking will be found among all the saints who saw the great apostasy of the end times coming. Mgr Sarto, the future Saint Pius X, taught nothing different to his diocesan faithful:

“The characteristic of our times is that indocility of mind which aims at the destruction of dogmas, and that corruption of the heart which leads to the subversion of Christian morals. There is only one way to defend faith and morals, and that is to meditate on the mysteries proposed by the Holy Rosary.” For, “if the world has forgotten even the vestiges of virtue, by contemplating the admirable examples put forward in the Rosary, we are better able to fight disordered passions within ourselves, we can rouse in our souls, along with a sincere regret for sin, a lively faith and a consoling hope, and we can help all the other virtues to blossom"