Rosary Army: Free Rosary, Catholic Podcasts, and More

I love the Eucharistic Congress, but I’ve rarely made it to Adoration, and I’ve never heard one speaker. Instead, I hang around with other Rosary Army soldiers and work in the trenches. Let me tell you it’s dangerous work.

We go to execute our mission: Make them. Pray them. Give them away. Boy do we make them. Knot after knot after knot. We have blisters. We have burns. We trample and trip each other pulling on twine that drags behind us as we move among the new recruits. At the end of the day we drag ourselves away, mangled and tired, but uplifted in the Spirit.

Some people think we are exhausted. Maybe a little. But the real truth is that we leave in a state of exhilaration. There’s something special about about teaching folks how to make a rosary. The joy on their faces when they make their first knots is cause for celebration. The little moment of teasing and joking when the second knot is a mess, or too far away, or plain wrong and ugly is a teachable moment.

Knotting a rosay is very much like living our faith. It takes practice to get things right. It takes patience, and persistance.  It also takes a little bit of humility. Often, even the experts, make mistakes and have to untie a knot and try again. Luckily, the twine is very forgiving. Like our God.

We gave away hundreds of knotted rosaries.  In fact, we gave away a couple of thousand rosaries, and when those ran out, we made chaplets with practice twine. We had new recruits who came back with finished rosaries and added them to the giveaway pile.

I know many of those folks took the rosary as a decorative token of the day. A souvenir. Perhaps it’s hanging from the rear view window in their cars, never to be prayed. We don’t know what the impact of that rosary will be, but we do know about the connections we made.

Our Church, the Body of Christ, is made up of people in different places on the faith journey. Many recognized the rosary as a “Catholic thing” but others heard, perhaps for the first time, how to pray it, what it means, the necessity for having a prayer life, and hopefully, they were transformed a little bit by what we shared with them between the joking and the ecouragement.

Just like each knot, uniquely made, comprises a finished rosary, so are each of us, uniquely made and interacting in our own special way, a part of the Church—a part of the Body of Christ.