The Lax Monastery Reformed
- Mary Prays
- 20 hours ago
- 2 min read
Attribution: from The Secret of the Rosary, Fourth Decade.
A nobleman placed one of his daughters in a monastery that had grown lax, where the nuns cared only for vanity and amusement. Their confessor, however, was a zealous priest devoted to the Rosary, and to guide this young nun he told her to pray it every day while meditating on the life, passion, and glory of Jesus Christ. She took up the devotion gladly, and little by little she came to dislike the empty ways of the house and grew to love silence and prayer, even though the others mocked her and called her a fanatic.
About this time a holy priest visiting the convent had a strange vision during his prayer. He saw this one nun kneeling rapt before a Lady of great beauty, the Blessed Virgin Mary, surrounded by angels who held flaming spears and drove back a crowd of demons trying to enter. The demons fled instead into the other nuns' rooms in the shape of vile animals. The priest understood then the sad state of the house, and was nearly overcome with grief.
He sent for the young nun, encouraged her to persevere, and decided to try to reform the others by the same means. He bought beautiful rosaries, gave one to each nun, and asked only that they pray it every day, promising not to force any other change on them. To his wonder they agreed, and as they prayed, silence and recollection crept back into their lives. In less than a year every one of them asked that the monastery be reformed. The Rosary had done what no amount of commanding could.
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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