In Praise of Rosaries, Scapulars and Indulgences

It occurred to me how consoling and healing it was reading “The Secret of the Rosary” back in grade school. The post-Vatican II response to the promises around the Rosary, as well as around the wearing of the scapular, were intended to discourage us and for us to see it as bordering on superstition. I was influenced in that direction certainly. Even the gospel’s miracle stories were de-emphasized, such as the Feeding of the Five Thousand reduced to a sermon on sharing. 


But the promises of the Rosary and scapular and indulgences seem a necessary antidote to the Pelagianism of our age. Nothing quite expresses the power of grace and God’s love like pondering the promises of those devotions and by implication the feebleness of man’s works compared to God’s. Instead, we tend to think man’s works and thoughts are determinative and prayer an add-on like the A-1 sauce on a steak. The pragmatism of our age whispers that only the material matters.  Or, if religiously bent, that only one's actions matter.  But the devotions mentioned above give unexpected power to the weak and confer benefits non-material. 

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 Justice Clarence Thomas in new book "Created Equal":

“I went off to school and I took all sorts of philosophy and took history, took theology. You read, you thought about things. Later in life, I was thinking back on my life, and I thought after all of that, the person who had the greatest influence and probably the most accurate was Sister Mary Dolorosa in the second grade in 1955 as we were beginning the Baltimore Catechism. She would say, “Why did God create us?” And the answer was pretty uniform—a whole group of second graders answered in unison: “God created us to know, love, and serve him in this life and be happy with him in the next.” So that’s pretty simple. After all the existentialism, having studied metaphysics, nihilists, you’ve been through all these, and you come back to Sister Mary Dolorosa and the second grade in September 1955. It seemed to me in a lot of ways that life was a circle that you started in one place, went away, and came back.”