looks down on him. In such moments, when fever, agony, and pain make it hard to pray, the suggestion of prayer that comes from merely holding the Rosary is tremendous—or better still, caressing the crucifix at the end of it. Because our prayers are known by heart, the heart can now pour them out, and thus fulfill the scriptural injunction to “pray always.” Prisoners of war during the last world war have told me how the Rosary enabled men to pray, almost continuously, for days before their death. The favorite mysteries then were generally the sorrowful ones, for by meditating on the suffering of Our Savior on the cross, men were inspired to unite their pains with him, so that, sharing in his cross, they might also share in his resurrection.
The Rosary is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known; it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying than the education of other men; it is the book of the aged, whose eyes close upon the shadow of this world, and open on the substance of the next. The power of the Rosary is beyond description. And here I am reciting concrete instances which I know. Young people, in danger of death through accident, have had miraculous recoveries—a mother, despaired of in childbirth, was saved with the child—alcoholics became temperate—dissolute lives became spiritualized—fallen-aways returned to the Faith—the childless were blessed with a family—soldiers were preserved during battle—mental anxieties were overcome—and pagans were converted. I know of a Jew who, in World War I, was in a shell hole on the Western Front with four Austrian soldiers. Shells had been bursting on all sides. Suddenly, one shell killed his four companions. He took a Rosary from the hands of one of them and began to say it. He knew it by heart, for he had heard others say it so often. At the end of the first decade, he felt an inner warning to leave that shell hole. He crawled through much mud and muck, and threw himself into another. At that moment a shell hit the first hole, where he had been lying. Four more times, exactly the same experience; four more warnings, and four times his life was saved! He promised then to give his life to Our Lord and to his Blessed Mother if he should be saved. After the war, more sufferings came to him; his family was burned by Hitler, but his promise lingered on. Recently, I baptized him—and the grateful soldier is now preparing to study for the priesthood.
All the idle moments of one’s life can be sanctified, thanks to the Rosary. As we walk the streets, we pray with the Rosary hidden in our hand or in our pocket; driving an automobile, the little knobs under most steering wheels can serve as counters for the decades. While waiting to be served at a lunchroom, or waiting for a train, or in a store; or while playing dummy at bridge; or when conversation or a lecture lags—all these moments can be sanctified and made to serve inner peace, thanks to a prayer that enables one to pray at all times and under all circumstances. If you wish to convert anyone to the fullness of the knowledge of Our Lord and of his Mystical Body, then teach him the Rosary. One of two things will happen. Either he will stop saying the Rosary—or he will get the gift of faith.
Chapter three
To Strengthen Families
One of the first inklings I had that I was going to marry my husband was the first time we prayed the Rosary together. The familiar prayers, recited one after the other, so well-known by each of us, connected us in a way that I’d never experienced before. It was both peaceful and exhilarating—the beginning of a strong foundation based on a mutual love of Jesus Christ and his Blessed Mother.
That experience is one reason why the famous words of “Rosary priest” Father Patrick Peyton resonate so deeply with me: “The family that prays together stays together.” This refrain was coined from Patrick Peyton’s lived experience, starting at a young age. In his autobiography, All for Her, Father Peyton (1909-92) explains how the family Rosary was a priority in his home every evening. No matter how exhausted his parents or eight brothers and sisters were at the end of the day, patriarch John Peyton insisted that the family gather to thank the Blessed Mother for watching over them for another day.
As a striking contrast, Father Peyton describes what life was like on his first night away from home after securing a job nearby. Having been welcomed into temporary residency in a Catholic home, he initially felt comfortable with the familiar family setting. He was shocked, therefore, when his host ushered him off to bed without first calling the family together to pray the Rosary as his father would have. “I was thunderstruck, absolutely speechless at the realization that a Catholic home existed … in which the people did not kneel together for family prayer,” he wrote. “While I pretended to sleep, I prayed my own Rosary and felt the pangs of homesickness, the bitterness of being among people whose ways were different from my own, whose sense of values failed to measure up to what all my training and experience had told me was normal.”
After a week, he finally admitted to his host how much it bothered him. “I don’t know what I said, but it was my first sermon on family prayer, my first appeal to another Catholic to imitate the practice of my own family and reap the same rewards,” he wrote.
Though he did not know it at the time, his appeal, however disjointed, was a success. The family soon after began praying the Rosary together every night.
This experience was clearly a pivotal moment for Peyton—one in which he realized that he could not and must not take the faith passed down to him by his parents for granted. And so it was this faith, personified in the Blessed Mother, to which he turned later in life when, during the course of his seminary studies, he fell gravely ill. The story of his return to health—his account of which follows—is the story of a miracle granted and a vocation confirmed. And it’s an event that propelled Father Peyton, once ordained, to devote the rest of his life to spreading family prayer, particularly in the Rosary.
The following excerpts from the first four chapters of All for Her chronicle this portion of his life, beginning with his earliest days in Ireland and ending with his miraculous healing. Afterward, Father Peyton began the Family Rosary Crusade, making use of radio, film, outdoor signage, and more than two hundred sixty Rosary rallies on six continents to promote family prayer to millions of people.
Such an effort sounds particularly appealing in modern times when it seems that Catholic families are moving further away from the Church and from actively nurturing a spiritual life in general. A 2015 study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, in conjunction with Holy Cross Family Ministries, which carries on the legacy of Father Peyton, indicated the following troubling statistics about the current state of family participation in a life of faith: Only 22 percent of Catholic families attend Mass weekly; 68 percent of Catholic parents have not enrolled their children in religious education; only 17 percent of parents who pray on their own also pray as a family; and only 13 percent of families pray together before meals.
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