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A surer help to Heaven there simply ain’t.

When these “Comments” concluded last week (# 890, August 3) that praying the Rosary was the solution to the present madness of supposed Church laws being “imposed” upon us by modernist Rome, many readers may have wondered, what connection can there be between the two? How can all the Church’s problems be off-loaded onto the Rosary, so to speak?

Yet before Sister Lucy of Fatima was replaced in the 1960’s by a dummy that would be rather more docile to the modernists, she was able to say that in our times God has given to the Rosary a special power, such that it can solve all problems. This power is something that Catholics (and non-Catholics) need to believe in, for the world’s imminent trials. The key is that the world around us empties out God, leaving a shell of Him at most. The prayer of the Rosary restores the sense of God, little by little, in human souls. Let us begin with the man-made absence of God, and pass on to the power of the Rosary.

Mankind’s emptying out of God began in modern times at the latest in the 1400’s with the decline of Catholic faith in God and with the corresponding rise of esteem for man in the so-called Renaissance, or “Rebirth” of man. The underlying idea was that the Middle Ages had so overvalued God as to undervalue man. This idea paved the way for the explosion of humanism, or the super-valuing of man for man’s sake, by Martin Luther (1483–1548), in the form of Protestantism in the early 1500’s. This fragmentary revolt of subjective man against the unified objective order of the God of Catholicism has dominated the modernity of “Western civilisation” ever since. To Protestantism can be traced back all the most important errors of our times, for instance Naturalism, Rationalism and especially Liberalism in the 1800’s, then Ecumenism, Modernism and especially Communism in the 1900’s. The godlessness has come a long way.

For well over 400 years the Catholic Popes held up the Catholic Faith against Luther, so to speak, but with Vatican II (1962–1965) they gave way, and by 2024 the way was clear for worldwide Games to start with a mockery of the Last Supper. Such blasphemy is virtually the new religion of “Western civilisation.” Fully to grasp just how long-standing and deep is the alienation of modern man from the one true God, it is necessary to read a portrait of Luther like that of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain in his book, “Three Reformers.” Luther’s violent uprising against God was in the very depths of the human soul. And so how can anyone pretend that praying the simple and repetitive Rosary can be a cure?

Physically, the Rosary engages, regulates and tranquillises all the most mobile parts of a human being: the fingers with the beads, the mouth with uttering the prayers, the mind with contemplating the Mysteries, maybe also the feet with walking up and down. This captivating of our fickle frame frees the soul to commune with God, i.e. to pray. My mind goes wool-gathering? The beads bring me back. And spiritually, the Mysteries centre on Our Lord, framed symmetrically within Mysteries of Our Lady (the unsymmetrical “Mysteries of Light,” added by modernists, should be disregarded). She gives Him birth, He dies for our sins, She is rewarded with the Queenship of the Universe.

Now “Rome is not built in a day.” Not even the Rosary may re-open Heaven in a few weeks. But whoever perseveres with the Rosary has every chance of getting back onto the wavelength of Heaven, and steadily more off that of the world. Each Mystery has its own lesson of God, and all fifteen together take me through the entire cycle of the history of our Redemption. Here is why I was ever born, and nowhere else. Here, passed in review in less than an hour, is what makes sense of the whole of Creation. Our lives on earth are not just “nasty, poor, brutish and short,” in the notorious words of an English philosopher. To get us to Heaven, Our Lord alone suffered for us all more than all of us put together could ever suffer. I want to get to Heaven. I will be faithful to the special prayer God gave to His Church to get me there!

Kyrie eleison.