King Alphonsus and the Weighing of the Rosaries

Attribution: from the accounts collected in The Secret of the Rosary.

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.

One day the King fell gravely ill, and when he was given up for dead he found himself in spirit before the judgment seat of the Lord. A crowd of devils stood accusing him of all his sins, and he was about to be condemned when Our Lady stepped forward for him. She called for a pair of scales, laid his sins in one dish, and in the other placed the rosary he had always worn, together with all the rosaries prayed by others because of his example. The rosaries weighed more than his sins.

"As a reward for the little service you did me in wearing my rosary," she told him kindly, "I have obtained a great grace for you from my Son. Your life will be spared a few more years. Spend them well, and do penance." When the King came to himself he cried, "Blessed be the Rosary of the most holy Virgin Mary, by which I have been delivered from damnation," and he spent the rest of his life praying it daily and spreading the devotion.

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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.