Every year during October, the Catholic Church asks the faithful to spend some time thinking about the Blessed Virgin Mary and praying a prayer closely associated with her: the rosary.

For many, many centuries, the Church has taught that the rosary is one of the greatest ways to pray.

Now – I am feeling perhaps more than ever before in my lifetime – we need frequent praying of the rosary. The headlines just this week alone are scary: war, destructive hurricanes, pandemic, rising crime. In these worrisome times, great comfort and solace can be found in the prayers of the rosary.

The rosary – more specifically, the recitation of the prayers of the rosary – has been hailed as a “compendium of the entire Gospel” and a powerful means of praying to God. For nearly eight centuries, popes, preachers, saints and even Mary herself have urged the faithful to pray the rosary.

One hundred and five years ago at Fatima – on Oct. 13, 1917 to be exact – Our Lady urged the three shepherd children to pray the rosary every day. She called herself the Lady of the Rosary and urged the children to “continue to say the five decades of the rosary every day... to obtain peace in the world.”

While it may be easy to excuse ourselves for not praying the rosary because it is too time consuming or we are too easily distracted by the stresses of modern day living, the graces one receives from reciting the rosary are too numerous not to set aside 15 minutes each day to recite those prayers.

For more than 800 years, the faithful have recited the rosary while contemplating on the joyful, sorrowful, glorious (and most recently luminous) events in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus.

For those same eight centuries, the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) have been proponents of the rosary. Hugo de Santa Clara, a 13th century Dominican priest, exhorted the faithful to pray the rosary. He once said, “If we salute her (Mary), she is not so ill-bred as to dismiss us without saluting us back... Mary is often to be saluted, that by her salute we may be filled with grace.”

Devotion to Our Lady and her rosary can lead to our own holiness. Not only at Fatima, but in all of her apparitions, Mary has encouraged the faithful to do what God tells us to do. Indeed, her last reported words in the Gospel were at the wedding feast at Cana when she said, “Do whatever He (Jesus) tells you to do.” (John 2:5) With Mary as role model, the faithful are drawn closer to Christ because, as she said, “my soul magnifies the Lord.” (Luke 1:46)

As we begin the month of October – the month of the rosary – we can renew our regular praying of the rosary and our devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, or we can become acquainted for the first time with the graces and blessings that come from praying the rosary.

In less than one week, on Oct. 7, we will be celebrating the Feast Day of Our Lady of the Rosary. Only good can come from praying the rosary. Pope Leo XIII, a great devotee of Our Lady, once said the rosary has the “power to instill confidence into the hearts of those who pray” it regularly.

Tradition holds that Blessed Alain de la Roche, a 15th century theologian, outlined a series of promises the Blessed Virgin made to the faithful who recite the rosary faithfully. Among those promises are Our Lady’s special protection, the destruction of vice and sin, and an increase in virtue, good works and God’s mercy.

Surely, they are all good things and urgently needed in times of war and strife and panic.