Stories

One day St. Gertrude had a vision of our Lord counting out gold coins. She gathered the courage to ask him what he was doing. He answered, "I am counting the Hail Marys that you have said. This is the money with which you purchase heaven."

One day St. Mechtilde was at prayer, trying to find some new way to show her love for the Blessed Virgin Mary, when she fell into ecstasy. Our Lady appeared to her with the words of the Hail Mary written in letters of gold across her breast.

When Father James Sprenger and his brethren were working to revive the Rosary and its Confraternity in Cologne, two priests famous for their preaching grew jealous of the good they were doing and began to speak against the devotion at every chance. Being eloquent and well respected, they turned many people away from it.

While St. Dominic was preaching the Rosary at Carcassonne, a heretic mocked his miracles and the mysteries of the Rosary, and his scoffing kept others from being converted. As a punishment, God allowed a great host of demons, said to be fifteen thousand, to take possession of the man.

Alphonsus, a king in Spain, wanted all his court to honour the Blessed Virgin Mary by praying the Rosary. So he wore a large rosary on his belt, although, strangely, he never prayed it himself. Even so, the sight of it encouraged his courtiers to say theirs with devotion.

Blessed Thomas of St. John was famous for his sermons on the holy Rosary, and the devil, jealous of all the good he did, tormented him until he fell gravely ill. He was sick so long that the doctors gave him up, and one night, when he truly believed he was dying, the devil appeared to him in the most terrifying form imaginable.

A young friar had the beautiful habit of saying Our Lady's Rosary every day before dinner. One day, for some reason, he had not managed to say it, and the refectory bell had already rung. He asked his Superior for permission to say it first, and withdrew to his cell.

By the middle of the fifteenth century the Confraternity of the Rosary that St. Dominic had founded had fallen into neglect, and Our Lady chose Blessed Alan de la Roche, a Dominican in Brittany, to revive it. He had been a great sinner in his youth, and it was the Blessed Virgin Mary, he was told, who had won the grace of his conversion.

One day St. Dominic was to preach at Notre Dame in Paris, on the feast of St. John the Evangelist, before the whole University and many noblemen. Anxious to give a fine sermon worthy of so learned a crowd, he was in a little chapel behind the high altar preparing it by saying the Rosary, as he always did, when the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him with a book in her hand.

Seeing that the weight of people's sins was blocking the conversion of the Albigensians, St. Dominic withdrew into a forest near Toulouse and prayed for three days and three nights, weeping and doing hard penance to turn aside the anger of God, until at last his strength gave out and he sank down exhausted.