We need to pray and to praise Mary
The Rosary remains a simple and effective prayer so that with Mary we may become disciples of Jesus Christ. To know Jesus Christ, to mediate and renew in our lives each of his Mysteries, is the theme of Father Chevrier. In this prayer that the Church ceaselessly urges, as does the Virgin herself in her apparitions, like those of Lourdes, the Mysteries of Jesus are followed with the eyes and heart of Mary. Further, Father Chevrier, as a good apostle to the poor, suggests to them this prayer in particular.
And how can we forget that it was Paolina Jaricot in Lyon who had the idea of the fifteen-member groups of the Living Rosary, just as she launched the Work of the Propagation of the Faith? In a few years, she was able to unite millions of people in France and in many other countries in a broad chain of solidarity, to meditate in turn on the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries, and to pray in accordance with the grand intentions of the Church: the salvation of sinners, and missions. She succeeded, as she herself put it, in "making the Rosary a pleasure for the masses."
Today there is the same need to praise Mary, to pray for her, to be available, like her, to the Holy Spirit, and to perform the work of her Son. It is a matter of educating the faithful, families, and children. Pray faithfully to the Most Holy Virgin, who wants only our earthly and eternal good; recite the Rosary in your families and in your parishes, praying insistently for perseverance in faith, in grace, in charity and the conversion of the dispossessed. Certainly Redemption includes the sufferings on the Cross and the adversities of the world; yet Mary is always present in the tribulations of human history and in the travails of our individual existence.
October 10, 1986