CWR: Praying the Rosary with Sacred Art: An interview with Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.
Fr. Lew, author of Mysteries Made Visible, says he hopes his book will “help people love and appreciate the Rosary more, to pray it better through the help of sacred art, and to help them to understand the mysteries of the Rosary with more theological and Christological depth.”
CWR: What role has the Rosary played in your own life?
Fr. Lew: As a convert from a devout evangelical Protestant family, I struggled initially with Marian devotions, and the Rosary seemed to be too complicated and opaque – how to meditate on the mysteries, the intentions I had, the virtues of the mysteries, and say the words simultaneously? So I struggled to say five decades of the Rosary in one go, and I didn’t enjoy praying it in a group because it seemed so perfunctory and rushed. Consequently, the Rosary seemed to be something desirable in theory, and although I did have periods of positive experiences, I often only prayed it because I felt guilted into doing so, perhaps at Lent or on certain feast days!
However, God’s providence and mercy are, thankfully, more abundant than my own inadequacies and weaknesses. So, God led me, through my love for theology and the Truth, to become a Dominican friar. Ours, of course, is the Order which claims the Rosary as our “sacred heritage and birthright” because traditionally we believe that Our Lady gave the Rosary to St Dominic, our founder. The Dominican Order has been associated with the Rosary for centuries and has preached it in art and song and processions and sermons; have formed and guided the Rosary Confraternity; and had for centuries had the exclusive right to bless Rosary beads. It was also a Dominican pope St Pius V who popularised the Dominican Rosary (with the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries) by asking for it to be prayed during the battle of Lepanto and who subsequently established a Rosary-related feast day on 7 October which is now called the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.
As a novice and a student brother I still struggled and often failed to pray five decades of the Rosary daily, as we are supposed to do, but during my time in Washington DC, where I was doing graduate studies as a priest, I began to pray the Rosary with my Dominican brothers at the Dominican House of Studies. Supported in this way by a praying community, I learnt to appreciate the rhythm and peace of the Rosary, and I started to enjoy praying the Rosary by myself. God gave me further help when I was assigned to the Rosary Shrine in London after my studies were completed, and I began to pray the Rosary more deliberately and conscientiously. I also began to read more about Our Lady and the Rosary. Finally, in 2019 the Master of the Dominican Order appointed me the Order’s Promoter General of the Rosary, and my reading and prayer had led me to realise that I could pray the Rosary better if I said it one or two decades at a time interspersed throughout the day. Our Lady gave me this grace of thus praying even as many as twenty decades a day with relative ease and joy.
The Rosary is now a part of my daily life, and the day seems incomplete without it. It is also one of the first things I turn to when a need arises, or when somebody asks for prayer, or when I feel spiritually restless. Our Lady of the Rosary asked us at Fatima to pray the Rosary daily for peace and for an end to the war, and I know that she grants peace of heart and soul, and an end to the rebellion of our sinful desires, to those who pray the Rosary daily.
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