The Rosary and the Possessed Girl
In the book, The Secret of the Rosary, St. Louis de Montfort relates that Father Jean Amat, a Dominican, was giving a Lenten Mission in the Kingdom of Aragon, Spain, when a young girl possessed by the devil was brought to him.
Father Amat began the exorcism. After several unsuccessful attempts, the priest had an idea; taking his Rosary, he looped it around the girl’s neck. No sooner had he done this, the girl began to squirm and scream and the devil, shouting through her mouth shrieked, “Take if off, take off; these beads are tormenting me!”
At last, moved to pity for the girl, the priest lifted the Rosary beads off her neck.
The next night, while the good Dominican lay in bed, the same devils who possessed the young girl entered his room. Foaming with rage, they tried to seize him, but he had his Rosary clasped in his hand and no efforts from the infernal spirits could wrench the blessed beads from him.
Then, going on the offensive and using the Rosary as a physical weapon, Fr. Amat scourged the demons crying out, “Holy Mary, Our Lady of the Rosary, help me, come to my aid!” at which the demons took flight.
The next day on his way to church, the priest met the poor girl, still possessed. One of the devils within her taunted him, “Well, brother, if you had been without your Rosary, we should have made short work of you…”
With renewed trust and vigor, the priest unlaced his Rosary from his belt, and flinging it around the girl’s neck commanded, “By the sacred names of Jesus and Mary His Holy Mother, and by the power of the holy Rosary, I command you, evil spirits, leave the body of this girl at once.”
The demons were immediately forced to obey him, and the young girl was freed.
“These stories,” concludes St. Louis de Montfort, “show the power of the holy Rosary in overcoming all sorts of temptations from the evil spirits and all sorts of sins because these blessed beads of the Rosary put devils to rout.”
The Rosary and the Fatima Message
Between May 13 and October 13, 1917, Our Lady appeared to three shepherd children, Jacinta, Lucia, and Francisco, at the Cova de Iria, near Fatima, Portugal. During six visits, Our Lady communicated to them a secret which had three parts. The first part was a vision of Hell. During this vision, Sister Lucia said numerous souls fell into Hell like “snowflakes.”
In the second part, Our Lady states that WWI would end, but “if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church.”
As Our Lady predicted, World War II erupted and the errors of atheist Communism spread. Our Lady added that many will be martyred and nations will be annihilated, if people do not convert. Have people converted? The answer is no. Can Divine punishment be avoided? It depends on the world’s fidelity to Our Lady’s requests.
Lucia asked Our Lady during the apparitions, “Who are you and what do you want?” Our Lady responded, “I am the Lady of the Rosary, and I have come to warn the faithful to amend their lives and ask pardon for their sins. People must not continue to offend the Lord, Who is already so deeply offended. They must say the Rosary.”
Therefore, Our Lady gave us a solution: the recitation of the daily Rosary for the conversion of sinners. The Fatima message is a remedy for our culture immersed in sin. If it were not for Our Lady’s promise that “Finally, My Immaculate Heart will Triumph,” we would be much dismayed and disheartened. So let us heed her requests. Let us practice the First Saturday devotions. Let us pray the daily Rosary. By fulfilling these requests, we will be consoling the sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary and hasten the triumph of good over evil.
Rosary Saves Man’s Life on September 11
A man from New York who had fallen away from the Catholic Church and not gone to confession in years was met at a TFP Fatima presentation given by America Needs Fatima Custodian, Jose Ferraz.
After the visit, the New Yorker took home a Rosary and Rosary Guide and started praying it and going to the sacraments again. Months later, on September 11, 2001, he was in the World Trade Center at the very moment when the terrorist attack took place.
Seeing the fireball and smoke from the crash, the man fled his office and tried running down the stairs to safety. However, he met a big obstacle. The fire doors had locked and he was trapped in the stairwell, listening to the screams of burning people who were still inside the building, unable to escape death. It was awful—horrific. Any attempt to pry open the fire doors with bare hands would be futile.
With Our Lady’s help, instead of panicking, he felt calm. He grabbed his Rosary and started praying to the Blessed Mother for help. And within minutes, firemen reached his floor, broke down the fire doors and set him free. He ran downstairs to safety, his prayers answered thanks to the power of the Most Holy Rosary.
The “Weight” of the Rosary and the Judgment Seat of God
“Whatever you do, do not be like a certain pious but stubborn lady in Rome, so often mentioned when speaking about the Rosary.
She was so devout and so fervent that she put to shame by her holy life even the strictest religious in the Church.
“Having decided to ask Saint Dominic’s advice about her spiritual life, she asked him to hear her confession.
For penance he gave her one whole Rosary to say and advised her to say it every day. She said that she had no time to say it, excusing herself on the grounds that she made the Stations of Rome every day, that she wore sackcloth and a hair shirt, that she carried out so many other penances and fasted so much.
Saint Dominic urged her repeatedly to take his advice and say the Rosary, but she would not hear of it. She left the confessional, horrified at the tactics of this new spiritual director who had tried so hard to persuade her to take on a devotion that was not at all to her liking.
“Later on, when she was in prayer, she fell into ecstasy and had a vision of her soul appearing before Our Lord’s Judgment Seat. Saint Michael put all her penances and other prayers onto one tray of the scales and all her sins and imperfections onto the other tray. The tray of her good works was greatly outweighed by the tray with her sins and imperfections.
“Filled with terror she cried for mercy, imploring the Blessed Virgin Mary’s help. Her gracious Advocate took the one and only Rosary that she had said for her penance and dropped it onto the tray of her good works. This one Rosary was so heavy that it weighed more than all her sins as well as all her good works. Our Lady then reproved her for refusing to follow the counsel of her servant Dominic and for not saying the Rosary every day.
“As soon as she came to she rushed and threw herself at Saint Dominic’s feet, and told him all that had happened. She begged his forgiveness for her unbelief and promised to say the Rosary faithfully every day. By this means she arose to Christian perfection and finally to the glory of everlasting life.
“You who are people of prayer— learn from this how tremendous is the power, the value and the importance of this devotion of the Most Holy Rosary when it is said together with meditation on the mysteries.”
*An excerpt from St Louis de Montfort’s The Secret of the Rosary (Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., 1999), 63–64.
The Rosary and Saint Dominic Defeat Heresy
The Rosary—as a spiritual weapon against evil—has a very long and precious history. In twelfth and thirteenth century France, a group of heretics known as the Albigensians was destroying the minds of the Catholic laity with its erroneous ideas. The Albigensians’ teachings encouraged suicide, many times by self-induced starvation, because they believed that the body was an intrinsic evil and that the soul must be liberated from matter at all costs. However, as history often shows, Providence raises up great Saints in times of dire crises. This time it was no different. Saint Dominic, born of noble lineage, received the Rosary from Our Lady in the year 1214. Our Lady gave Saint Dominic the Rosary as a weapon to combat the awful Albigensian heresy.
The Rosary as we know it today took some time to develop. After Saint Dominic died in the year 1221, the Rosary was almost immediately forgotten. However, in 1464 Our Lord, Our Lady, and Saint Dominic appeared to Blessed Alan de la Roche, a Dominican friar, after which he preached the Rosary until his death in 1475. This tremendous apostolate by Blessed Alan de la Roche, through the direct intercession of Our Lady, made the Rosary a widespread devotion. The fifteen mysteries as we know them came about through the many confraternities founded after Blessed Alan de la Roche’s preaching, and were formalized with Pope Saint Pius V’s encyclical, Consueverunt.
The Rosary and the Battle of Lepanto
The Battle of Lepanto was a crucial conflict between the Christians and the Ottoman Turks, one of the greatest naval battles of all time. The Christian lands around Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean were constantly getting sacked by Muslim pirates, and Imperial warships were ravaging the land. At this point in time, Pope Saint Pius V saw it appropriate to raise a Crusade against these heathen Muslims. After raising a Crusade, he asked every non-combatant across the whole Christian world to pray the Rosary.
Even after this call to arms, the Christian fleet at Lepanto was greatly outnumbered by the Ottoman Turks. The Crusaders got on their knees and began to pray the Rosary. Soon after, the Christians and the Muslims were immersed in a bloody battle. Thus it was that on October 7, 1571, the Christian fleet was blessed with a miraculous victory. Pope Saint Pius V immediately dedicated the victory to Our Lady, establishing October 7 as “The Feast of the Most Holy Rosary.”
Holy Rosary Crusade of Reparation
After World War II, Austria was divided between four countries: America, France, the United Kingdom, and Russia. At the time, Russia was still communist. The section of Austria controlled by the communists was the richest, and included the city of Vienna. The Viennese were subject to the all the atrocities and tyrannies of communism. However, in 1946, Fr. Petrus Pavlicek, after making a pilgrimage to Mariazell, the principle Marian shrine in Austria, was told by an interior voice: “Do as I say and there will be peace.”
To obey this inspiration of Our Lady, Fr. Pevlicek founded the Holy Rosary Crusade of Reparation in 1947. This Crusade consisted of the Viennese faithful coming out of their homes in order to participate in a public Rosary procession in the streets of the city. The intentions of the Rosary were for the end of communism in their country and in the world. At first, the processions were miniscule, but in time they grew to staggering proportions. In 1955, after eight years spreading the word about the Crusade throughout Austria, the Rosary processions would reach sizes of half a million people, about 1/10 of the Austrian population. Finally, through the help of Our Lady, the Soviet forces pulled out of Austria in October of 1955, leaving the country for good.
Saint Expelled 15,000 Devils from Heretic
From the Secret of the Rosary, pp. 76-79 by St. Louis De Montfort
When Saint Dominic was preaching the Rosary near Carassone, in Southern France, an Albigensian was brought to him who was possessed by devils. Saint Dominic exorcised him in the presence of a great crowd of people. His fame was spreading, and it appears that over twelve thousand people had come to hear him preach.
The devils in possession of this wretched man were forced to answer Saint Dominic’s question, in spite of themselves. They said that:
There were 15,000 of them in the body of this poor man, because he had attacked all of the fifteen mysteries of the most Holy Rosary.
They went on to testify that by preaching the Rosary, St. Dominic had put fear and horror into the very depths of hell, and that he was the man they hated most throughout the whole world, because of the souls which he snatched from them through devotion to the Holy Rosary.
They then revealed several other things.
The Greatest Saint
Saint Dominic put his Rosary around the Albigensian’s neck and asked the devils to tell him who, of all the saints in Heaven, was the one they feared the most, and who should therefore be the most loved and revered by men. At this, they let out such unearthly screams that most of the people fell to the ground, faint from fear.
Then, using all their cunning so as not to answer, the devils wept and wailed in such a pitiful way that many of the people wept also, out of purely natural pity. The devils spoke through the mouth of the Albigensian, pleading in a heart-rending voice, saying:
“Dominic Dominic, have mercy on us – we promise you that we will never hurt you. You have always had compassion for sinners and those in distress, have pity on us, for we are in grievous straits. We are suffering so very much already, so why do you delight in heightening our pains? Can’t you be satisfied with our suffering without adding to it? Have pity on us! Have pity on us!”
Saint Dominic was not one bit moved by the pathos of these wretched spirits, and told them that he would not let them alone until they had answered his question. Then they said that they would whisper the answer in such a way that only Saint Dominic would be able to hear. The latter firmly insisted upon their answering clearly and out loud.
Silence
Then the devils were able to keep quiet and refused to say another word, completely disregarding St. Dominic’s orders…. So he knelt down and prayed thus to Our Lady: “Oh, all powerful and wonderful Virgin Mary, I implore You by the power of the Most Holy Rosary, order these enemies of the human race to answer me.”
No sooner had he made this prayer than a glowing flame leaped out of the ears, nostrils, and mouth of the Albigensian. Everyone shook with fear, but remarkably, the fire did not hurt the man or anyone near him.
Let Us Leave!
Then the devils cried: “Dominic, we beseech you, by the passion of Jesus Christ and by the merits of His Holy Mother and of all the saints, let us leave the body of this man without speaking further – for the angels will answer your question whenever you wish. After all, are we not liars? So why should you want to believe us? Please do not torture us any more; have pity on us.”
“Woe unto you wretched spirits, who do not deserve to be heard,” Saint Domic said, and kneeling down he prayed to Our Lady:
“Oh most worthy Mother of Wisdom, I am praying for the people assembled here who have already learned how to say the Angelic Salutation properly. Please. I beg of You, force Your enemies to proclaim the whole truth about this, and nothing but the truth, here and now, before the multitude.”
Saint Dominic had hardly finished this prayer when he saw the Blessed Virgin near at hand, surrounded by a multitude of angels. She gently struck the possessed man with a golden rod that She held, and said: “Answer My servant Dominic at once.” (The people neither saw nor heard Our Lady, but only Saint Dominic.) Then the devils started screaming:
“O, You who are our enemy, our downfall, and our destruction, why have You come from Heaven just to torture us so grievously? Oh, Advocate of sinners, You who snatch them from the very jaws of hell, You who are the surest path to Heaven, must we, in spite of ourselves, tell the whole truth and confess before everyone who it is who is the cause of our shame and our ruin? Oh, woe to us, princes of darkness…..all right…..:
Listen Well!
“Then listen well, you Christians: the Mother of Jesus Christ is all-powerful, and She can save Her servants from falling into hell. She is the Sun which destroys the darkness of our wiles and subtlety. It is She who uncovers our hidden plots, breaks our snares, and makes our most intense temptations useless and ineffectual.
“We have to say, however reluctantly, that not a single soul who has really persevered in Her service has ever been damned with us; one single sigh that She offers to the Blessed Trinity is worth far more than all prayers, desires, and aspirations of all the other saints combined.
“We fear Her more than all the saints in Heaven together, and we have no success with Her faithful servants Many Christians who call upon Her when they are at the hour of death, and who really ought to be damned according to our ordinary standards, are saved by Her intercession.
“Oh, if only that MARY (it is thus, in their intense fury, that they called Her) had not pitted Her strength against ours, and had not upset our plans, we could have conquered the Church and have destroyed it long before this…… and we would hve seen to it that all the Orders in the Church fell into error and disorder.
“Now that we are forced to speak, we must also tell you this: nobody who perseveres in saying the Rosary will be damned, because She obtains for Her servants the grace of true contrition for their sins, and by means of this, they obtain God’s forgiveness and mercy.”
The Devils Leave
Then a wonderful thing happened! Saint Dominic had all the people say the Rosary together very slowly and with great devotion. At each Hail Mary that he and the people said together, a hundred devils issued forth from the wretched man’s body under the guise of red-hot coals, which neither burned nor harmed the man. This happened until all 15,000 devils left the man’s body!
When the devils had all been expelled and the heretic was at last entirely free of them, Our Lady, who was still invisible to everyone else except Saint Dominic, proceeded to give Her blessing to the assembled company. They could all somehow feel the blessing, and they became filled with even more joy because of this extraordinary experience.
A large number of heretics were converted because of this miracle. Many heretics and previous non-believers then became ardent devotees of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a good number of them even became faithful members of the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary.