From the Pastor’s desk— October 12, 2025
Dear Parishioners,
Since October is the month of the rosary, I’d like to share my own story of the rosary in my life.
When I was a child, my family had a row of pegs inside the front door of the house where all of our rosaries would hang. There were wood rosaries, plastic rosaries, and glass-beaded rosaries, all beautiful to look at together on the wall. Sometimes in the evening we would all pick our favorite rosaries and gather in the living room to pray together. My parents and older siblings would take turns leading the mysteries. Today, my parents don’t remember it, so we must not have done it often- but it made a big impression on me!
When I was in high school, a friend gave me one of his extra rosaries to use. We went on a retreat together and I wanted to learn how to pray afterward. Around that same time my dad sent me a rosary with Our Lady of Guadalupe pictured on the beads that he bought for me in Arizona. That was the beginning of my own collection of rosaries given to me by many friends and family over the years. From that time, I committed to learning to pray the rosary at least sometimes.
In college, I began spending more time with other Catholic friends and sometimes we would pray the rosary together. My roommate invited me to pray with him between classes on our lunch break. That’s when I started always carrying a rosary in my pocket. Even when I wasn’t praying it, the rosary was reminding me to pray. It also became a witness to others who saw me carrying it!
Over the years, I have had times when I didn’t often pray the rosary, and other times when I prayed it every day. For a while I even prayed all twenty mysteries every day. That’s 203 Hail Mary’s! I also like to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet with my beads. Meditation on the rosary brings peace in place of the worldly anxiety offered by news and other media.
I would be thrilled if someone wanted to lead the rosary before all of our Sunday masses. If everyone at Sacred Heart prayed the rosary, God would do great things for us.
Fr. Joseph