A Rosary Novena for Our Times

“Lord, bring peace to a world lamenting and anguishing for rest. Amen”

This is our Lepanto moment. With the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on October 7, please join me in praying this beautiful and powerful novena of rosaries given to us by Mr. Wade Chio. Each day’s intention will be prayed at the beginning of the rosary. The novena may begin Sept. 28 through Oct. 6, or begin Sept. 29 and end Oct. 7, the feast day. And please share with others!

OPENING NOVENA PRAYER (To be prayed each day of the novena)

Lord Jesus, heavenly Mother, for the following nine weeks (or nine days) we bring to You our cry for help. Everything we hold dear is being challenged all around us. You are our hope in the midst of turmoil, so we bring to You our deepest concerns. Our fears and concerns come from our heart. In humility we look for the grace we need for the challenges we now face as well as those we see coming for our families, our nation, and our Church. We come to You in a world that is turning away from God, to ask You to save what we know is dear to Your own Two Hearts. Amen.

Week 1 or Day 1: The Church

We pray fervently for the body of Christ to be reunited in faith. There are many truly good people who are a part of Your body, Lord. However, we have become fragmented into more than 35,000 denominations, each with its own understanding of the one Truth. It means that many loving brothers and sisters who call You “Lord” are left without the most essential gifts You gave Your Church: the sacraments. It is in Mass where we come to witness and participate in Your sacrifice and receive spiritual nourishment in its fruit, the Eucharist; we are thankful to receive this each and every day. Our splintered theologies leave many without the means You gave us, with all authority in Heaven and on earth, for reconciling our sins with our Father; this potentially effects the salvation of many good and loving souls. Your Word, Lord, along with the living witness of the early Christians, contain all that is necessary to unite us. Help us to accept Your teaching. Many, too, are those who, for one reason or another, knew the truth of faith and left these precious gifts behind, possibly placing many souls in jeopardy. We pray for the same grace of loving revelation that reached the heart of the prodigal son. We look not for winners and losers in the process of reconciling, but rather simple joy in experiencing Your gifts. We pray lovingly for the day that all Christians may look upon each other as one body, celebrating Your mercy and jointly offering praise and thanksgiving for the suffering You endured for all of us.

Meanwhile, within our Church many have grown lukewarm in the practice of their faith, even losing belief in your True Presence and failing to bring their sins to timely reconciliation, for life is short. It also means that many participate by receiving the Eucharist sacrilegiously, thus compounding their spiritual plight. Our culture has fallen off the deadly cliff of modernism, relativism,  immodesty, and materialism. Piety and solemnity are losing ground. Help us to rediscover the zeal for truth, charity, and holiness which marked the early Church. By Your mercy, Lord, make us aware of our sinfulness and turn our hearts to remorse. The Bride, Lord, needs Your Divine help to make herself ready, washing our robes in Your Blood through the sacraments of Baptism and Reconciliation and through our prayer and penance, for we know not the day nor the hour. We pray for those who can stand up and stand out to set the example and light a fire in the whole body of Christ: our youth, our seminarians, those in Christian formation, and through inspired evangelization by priests, bishops and laity. May our bishops be given the boldness to act jointly in standing up to the threats which attack the fundamental elements of faith and life issues. Amen.

Week 2 or Day 2: Our Parish

We ask you, Lord, to protect and strengthen our parishes. Help us to be an example of the love and mercy You deposited with the early Church. We pray for a community that commits itself to the frequent participation in the Mass and sacraments. Help us in our activities to be an example to the world around us. We pray also for spiritual unity in carrying out the spiritual and corporal works of mercy so fundamental to a community family. Let Your Church be a place where we respect one another and cease from idle talk or complaining to and about one another. “Do not grumble against one another, my brothers, lest you be condemned” (James 5:9). Lord, we ask You to help us understand that Your Church is Your Temple and resting place among us and that we should respect Your presence by our solemn behavior whenever we enter and prepare to leave. In this community in which we celebrate Your Mass, may dignity and respect for Your sacrifice be observed from its beginning until its end by rendering it our fully attentive presence, our prayer, our full participation, and thanksgiving for this great privilege. Help  us, Lord, to be sensitive to the needs of others in our parish community and pledge ourselves to serving in our parish by our active participation and financial support. We pray for an opportunity for perpetual adoration of Your presence among us through expansion of perpetual adoration chapels in all parishes that can support them, or shared adoration of multiple parishes which can join together to honor Your presence. May You never be left alone in our tabernacles. Amen.

Week 3 or Day 3: Priests

Lord, Your priests are the manifestation of Your presence on earth. It is through your priests that You teach us, exercise Your infinite mercy, and feed us. We pray fervently for Your priests to be spared from all the temptations of life. Preserve our priests in holiness so they may minister to us as natural extensions of Your presence among us. Give them the boldness and vision through grace to teach truth without regard to how it may be received. We acknowledge that we may hear teachings that are difficult for us in this age of modernism. We depend on these good men to guide us through life. When we are sorrowful, they are there. When we have sinned, they are there. When every major turn in our lives occurs, they are there. Yet many scrutinize and criticize them, forgetting they are Yours, so we pray to You for them. If they are weak in some way, we ask You to shower them with the fire of the Holy Spirit. May they support one another in need and be encouraged as we lift them up and accept their human limitations. It is a difficult, yet blessed, calling of one’s life. Bring many more men to the priesthood who are willing to dedicate their lives to continuing Your work on earth. Raise up among them the most capable to serve as our bishops, the voice and shepherds of Your Church. Give our bishops the boldness to teach the Gospel to our communities which are in such need of that Truth which has been uncompromisable throughout time. Amen.

Week 4 or Day 4: Families

Lord, make our families extensions of Your Church on earth. Help us to foster love and mercy for one another and pass on to the next generation the faith which we inherited. May we do all things together in prayer and thanksgiving for all that You have given us. Whatever may happen, let prayer in our family become a tradition we pass from generation to generation. So many things are beyond the grasp of our hands and nowhere is that felt more than within our own family. Help us heal strained relationships and preserve peace in our families so they may indeed be a refuge where we might find solace and happiness. Help us to be forever forgiving of one another and sensitive for one another’s pains in life. Strengthen the bonds of love that hold us together so that we may be a refuge for one another in times of pain and sorrow. Above all, Lord, help us keep our family together in love and in faith. Help parents who are struggling to keep their children in their faith. Ultimately it is the will of our children to choose, thus we pray for children to have an environment that has given them the truth and the graces for a fulfilling life in Christ’s Church. We know that leaving the Church is not a one-way street and if they leave, like the prodigal son, we pray they will find their way home. Help us all to consider how we spend our time as family, simplifying our lives, removing the impediments to prayer and worship, revaluating our recreation choices, and rethinking our material aspirations. We are responsible for only one thing: helping one another to find salvation and happiness with You. Our family is our vocation and our greatest sacrifice. Lord, without You at the core of our family, what hope can there be for us? Amen.

Week 5 or Day 5: the Holy Souls in Purgatory

There was a time in our past, Lord, where Christians everywhere remembered the souls that have gone before us. Today, so often our loved ones die and within weeks they are just a memory, forgotten as life goes on. We are seemingly entrenched with the belief that our loved ones have gone off to a better place and are with You now in Heaven. We have so often lost sight that Your justice entails not only forgiveness for our sins, but also the debt due to our sins. You forgave David for disobediently taking a census. However, You made him pay for the injury done to Your justice by sending a plague on his people to pay the debt incurred (1Chron 21). We wish to renew our faith and respect Your justice in which each of us are freely forgiven. We also believe and respect that we must pay the debt for our sins either in this life through penance or suffering in Purgatory. You Yourself taught, “Unless ye do penance, you shall likewise perish” (Luke 13:5). We therefore lift up the souls of our family and friends who have gone before us and dedicate this Rosary to them, offering our suffering as penance. We join it to Your own passion and suffering to plead for the forgiveness of their debt to You and for the release of their souls. We confidently pray that they soon may look upon the beauty of Your Beatific vision and share in everlasting joy. Jesus, we see from scripture that You hold the keys to death and the netherworld (Rev. 1). We ask You to exercise Your mercy on all souls who You love, yet are paying for their debt, especially the many souls for whom no one prays. We pledge ourselves to never forget their need. Amen.

Week 6 or Day 6: Our Youth

Lord, we lift up our youth. We have watched so many of them drifting away from the faith seeking the many distractions that life presents today. We offer our constant prayer for the grace needed to change lives and reveal Your truth even in the midst of  a time of darkness. We are hopeful, as witnessed every World Youth Day, that faith can be rallied and a fire lit to bring hope for generations to come. We ask You to reveal Your truth to our children to remain in the faith, their greatest hope for salvation. We pray for the strength of their faith to lead our Church and our nation out of darkness and into Your light of Glory. There is an innate goodness in our youth that needs to manifest and grow at the earliest age. We ask for Your grace to be poured out in our children’s and grandchildren’s lives so they may be inclined toward the light, doing good and forsaking evil. Protect them from the harm of darkness brought on by materialism, social pressures, drugs, sensuality, and rebellion. Spare them from the oncoming flood of attacks on chastity and give them the grace of purity. We ask You, Lord, to touch those who would best serve our church as priests and religious in the ages to come, and culture in them the fire of faith. Prepare our children to be guided into living a life of desire to serve others rather than seeking self-satisfaction. Our Church, our nation, and the world stand in need of those who will grow up sensitized to the needs of others. “He who would save his life will lose it; he who loses himself for My sake will find out who he is” (Matt 16:25). This message is not only our hope for ourselves to serve as good parents but also for our youth. Amen.

Week 7 or Day 7: Our Nation

We bring our nation to You, Lord, asking for the reordering of our priorities to the guiding principles of its founding: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our nation was founded on Your precepts which were posted everywhere for all to see and recall. We have witnessed in our lifetime the erosion of genuine goodness, sacrifice, and dedication to a higher order of purpose. Our priorities have always been first to God, then to family and nation, and finally to self. We have seen prayer stripped from our schools and public display. We have seen marriage, the sacred union between a man and a woman, degraded and despised. We manipulate life from conception to death and attempt to replace Your Will with our own seeming control. The very Commandments from which our laws were written have disappeared from public view. However, there remain strong voices among us who would see the return of our nation to You. We ask You to be merciful and pour out on us the grace to change direction and return to the values of our calling as a spiritual nation founded under Your blessings. Strengthen the holy foundation of our nation and diminish the ungodly destructive forces that would tear apart all that is good about America. Bring to our leaders at all levels the fullness of sensitivity to the life and wellbeing of our people and national institutions. We pray for America to return to the purpose of being that one nation under God, the hope of people everywhere. As you so simply expressed to your people, “Return to Me and I will return to you” (Zach 1:3). Amen.

Week 8 or Day 8: Life

You, Lord, are the Author of Life. You give life as a gift of Your goodness and love. You choose when to create life and give it a soul. You choose when to end our brief time on earth. It is our commitment to yield to Your greater understanding of life. We have lost our understanding of the created order, believing we can manipulate, even frustrate it. We do so through unnatural means of birth control, abortion, and euthanasia. Help us Lord to recognize Your Will in life and step back from the desire to control it. Have mercy on those who take life and give them the grace to feel the joy that comes with new life. We especially pray for the mothers of aborted children. They, too, are victims in need of healing. We pray not only for their forgiveness, but also for their mental and spiritual healing. We pray not for their condemnation but rather for an outpouring of Your love for their now-wounded hearts. As we grow older, we have come to realize the impact of having contracepted generations of children in the Christianized world. We now recognize its impact upon our system of social welfare designed to provide for us in our fading years. We see its effect by our empty churches, a lack of vocations, and the effects of a shrinking population of Christians in our world, leading to difficulty in practicing our faith, war, terror, and competing ideologies. As children, we come before You begging Your mercy and loving support to help us through this winter of aridity and bring us into a spring of rebirth. Accept this Rosary, Lord in reparation for man’s sins against life. Amen.

Week 9 or Day 9: Peace

You, Lord, did not create war; we did. From the days when Cain waged a jealous war with his brother, taking Abel’s life, we have been unable to resist the temptation. We have seen many human weaknesses which cause wars and killing: greed, hatred, power, discrimination, distrust and envy. The outcome of war leaves us with silent fields of the dead, lives terminated and loved ones grieving. In the pathways of our wars are left devastation and lives wiped out, lives caught in the middle of wars for which they did not ask. We pray for the millions of civilians whose lives are uprooted and mutilated, whose only involvement was to be in the path of war’s cruelty. Lord, bring peace to a world lamenting and anguishing for rest. We each have family and friends who have become engaged in the cruelty of war as we know it. Protect them wherever they sleep and walk this day, and all the days they are in danger. Heal the soldiers who will come home with lives forever altered by the effects of war, both physical and mental. You once said, “There is no greater love than for a man to lay down his life for another” (John 15:13). So many have given their lives and are doing so now even as we pray. We pray for their salvation and their grieving families. We ask You, Lord, to frustrate the true enemy of God and man, and bring us to everlasting peace. We long for the day when no man will look upon another as an enemy. Amen.

CLOSING NOVENA PRAYER (To be said at the end of Week 9 or Day 9)

Lord, we pray with confidence because we know what the conclusion will bring: a perpetual springtime. Between now and then we also know there will be many days of tears and suffering. We have prayed these prayers that all we hold dear for our families, our nation, and our Church might fulfill all that You desire. We are humble in admitting that we have fallen short; however, through You all things are possible. With our continued prayer and Your grace, we pray that Your Will may be done in ourselves and others and that we may find the peace that we so dearly seek. Save our children, Lord. May their goodness light up the darkness in a cold world. Make our families a source of comfort and refuge. Help our Church to worship You in truth, with greater sensitivity to the needs of others as our most important work. Give us the fire of Your Spirit to evangelize our faith boldly, with loving confidence. Show us how to be simple in the midst of a materialistic world. May we treat each dawn as if it were the last that we will spend on earth doing the works You have planned for us from all eternity. Amen.

(You are invited to pray this novena often or even perpetually. Events are so drastic and happening so fast, our continued prayer is essential. Add your own intentions as personal and world circumstances dictate, and whatever you do, pray and keep your soul prepared.)

Authored by Mr. Wade Chio

(Image byArtemisia Gentileschi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)