The Daily Hail Mary That Broke Two Chains

Related by Father Paul Segneri in his work "The Christian Instructed," concerning Father Nicholas Zucchi.

A young man of Rome, given to bad habits and weighed down with sin, went to confession to Father Nicholas Zucchi. The confessor received him kindly, pitied his state, and told him that devotion to Our Lady would free him from his vices. As his penance, he told the youth that until his next confession he should, every morning on rising and every evening on going to bed, say a Hail Mary to the Blessed Virgin Mary, offering her his eyes, his hands, and his whole body, and asking her to keep him as her own; and that he should kiss the ground three times. The young man did this, at first with little visible improvement, but the father kept urging him never to drop it and to trust in Mary's protection.

After a while the youth left Rome and traveled abroad with some companions. When he returned and came again to his confessor, the father was amazed and overjoyed to find him entirely changed and free of his old faults. "My son," he asked, "how did you obtain so happy a change from God?" "Father," the young man answered, "Our Lady, through that little devotion you taught me, won this grace for me."

The story did not end there. The same confessor told this from the pulpit, and an officer who for several years had carried on a sinful relationship with a certain woman heard it. He resolved to take up the same devotion in order to break the tie that held him, and he too left his bad ways and changed his life. But six months later, foolishly trusting in his own strength, he decided one day to go and see whether the woman had also changed. As he reached the door of her house, where he was in plain danger of falling back into sin, he felt himself pushed back by an unseen force, and suddenly found himself the whole length of the street away, standing before his own door. He understood clearly that Mary had saved him from his ruin.

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Source:

Simplified retellings of the "example" stories that St. Alphonsus Liguori placed at the end of each section of The Glories of Mary. These are paraphrased in plain modern prose, faithful to the substance of the 1888 English translation. Liguori himself, in his author's "Protest," noted that the miracles and apparitions in the book are offered on human authority only, not as articles of faith.