Don Perez, the Cousin of St. Dominic
- Mary Prays
- 20 hours ago
- 2 min read
Attribution: from The Secret of the Rosary, Fourth Decade.
St. Dominic had a cousin named Don Perez who was living a thoroughly immoral life. Hearing that Dominic's preaching on the Rosary was converting many, he said, "I had given up all hope of being saved, but now I begin to take heart again. I must hear this man of God." So he came to a sermon, and Dominic, seeing him, preached against sin with all his force and begged God to show his cousin the true state of his soul.
Don Perez was shaken, but still he would not change. He came again, and this time Dominic, knowing that so hard a heart needed something extraordinary, cried out, "Lord Jesus, let this whole congregation see the state of the man who has just entered your house." At once everyone saw Don Perez surrounded by a band of demons in the shape of hideous beasts, holding him in iron chains. The people fled in terror, and Don Perez, seeing how everyone shrank from him, was more horrified than any of them.
Dominic told them all to stand still and said to his cousin, "Unhappy man, see the state you are in. Throw yourself at Our Lady's feet. Take this rosary, pray it with sorrow for your sins, and resolve to change your life." Don Perez knelt and prayed the Rosary, and a longing rose in him to confess, which he did with heartfelt sorrow. When he left the church his face was no longer dreadful to see, but shining like an angel's. He kept to the Rosary for the rest of his days, lived an ordered life, and died a happy death.
Source:
Simplified retellings of the miracle and conversion stories that St. Louis de Montfort gathered in The Secret of the Rosary, written in the early eighteenth century. These are paraphrased in plain modern prose, faithful to the substance of the traditional English translation but not word for word. Montfort himself called them "ancient but authentic stories about the holy Rosary," collected from earlier authors such as Blessed Alan de la Roche, and offered on human authority, not as articles of faith.
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