The Holy Lady of Rome and the one Rosary

Attribution: from the accounts told by preachers of the Rosary; Montfort places it in the Twenty-sixth Rose.

A lady in Rome led such a strict and fervent life that she put even the strictest religious to shame. When she came to St. Dominic for direction and made her confession, he gave her one Rosary for her penance and urged her to pray it every day. She excused herself, listing all her own exercises: the daily round of Rome's churches, the hair-shirt, the disciplines, the fasts. She would not take up a devotion she had no taste for, and she left the confessional half offended.

Later, at prayer, she fell into ecstasy and saw her soul before the judgment seat. St. Michael laid all her penances and prayers on one side of the scales, and all her sins and imperfections on the other, and the sins weighed far more. Terrified, she cried out for mercy and begged the help of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who took the single Rosary she had prayed for her penance and laid it on the side of her good works. That one Rosary outweighed everything, sins and penances alike. Our Lady then gently reproved her for having refused the counsel of her servant Dominic.

The moment she came to herself she ran and threw herself at St. Dominic's feet, begged his pardon for her unbelief, and promised to pray the Rosary faithfully every day. By that path she rose to great holiness and, in the end, to eternal glory.

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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.