A few ways to honor the month of the Rosary

This past Thursday I joined the Morning Air team to give one last push for the month of the rosary. You can listen to the audio here. I’ve also summarized below what we covered, as well as a few other ideas we didn’t get to:

• Give a rosary away! You’d be surprised by how people are impacted by receiving a rosary if they need it. Think of someone suffering, for example, and you share your own experience of praying the rosary with them. It can be very powerful.

• Visit a Marian shrine - or just the Mary statue at your own church! Give her a flower crown, place a rosary on her hands, bring her some flowers. It’s like a mini pilgrimage.

• Help a new mother - or a mother at any stage. Mary was Jesus’s mother, and she is our mother, and we all know moms need help sometimes (often). Bring a meal to a new mom, take her other kids to the park, run an errand for her, pay for a housecleaning service.

• That last point is similar to another point: give alms. Jesus and Mary are close to the poor, and you can give alms - aka donate money - as a form of tribute. Particularly appropriate would be a pregnancy resource center.

• Learn about a saint who had a devotion to Mary or even wrote a book about her. We talked about St. Louise Marie de Montfort and “True Devotion to Mary,” and St. Maximilien Kolbe as examples.

• Last but not least: find out if your parish has a Legion of Mary - and attend a meeting!

Just a few more days of this month of the rosary - and it’s just about All Saints and All Souls Days! May your Halloween be spooky and holy.

It's still October, did you know?

In first news: Blessed Bartolo Longo is now St. Bartolo Longo. How cool!

Secondly: I will be on Morning Air this Thursday at my usual 8:20 am eastern time, to talk about how it’s still October. And what does that mean? It means it’s still the month of the rosary. That also means we should still be praying the rosary, but also thinking of other ways to honor this powerful prayer and our Blessed Mother for the remaining weeks of October. However, October is not the only time to be rosary-minded; what we’ll be talking about applies any time of year.

Find how you can listen here.

Blessed Bartolo Longo, pray for us

This morning I had the pleasure of appearing once again on Morning Air on Relevant Radio to discuss how some people start out really, really bad - like satanic bad - and turn it around in time to become a saint. That’s right, we discussed Blessed Bartolo Longo, the Italian atheist/revolutionary possessed by demons who then realized the errors of his ways (due to lots of prayers by those around him) and spent the rest of his life in charitable works, devoted to Mary. You can listen to the interview here, starting at 19:18.

His story is hard, because it’s so relatable. How many people choose the wrong path, because of grief or disappointment, or something similar? What strikes me about Bartolo is that he eventually chose correctly. And isn’t that all life is? A series of choices? And we must use our own moral judgement, and ask God for guidance, to make it through.

He will be canonized October 19. Blessed Bartolo Longo, pray for us!