Liberals Target the Rosary

“Guns and Rosaries” and “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol.” these were the first two titles of an anti-Catholic hit piece in U.S.-based magazine The Atlantic. After widespread protests, the title was changed to the less offensive “How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary,” but the vicious tone of the piece itself has not been altered.

The article claims that a number of “armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.”

The piece speaks of “images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer … crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants,” and “constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus, providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks.”

The hatchet-piece came just two days after The Atlantic published another article downplaying the radical and often-violent pro-abortion group called Jane’s Revenge. “The Right’s New Bogyman" questioned whether the group is “for real,” and questioning if the radical collective is actually behind the recorded acts of violence and vandalism they have taken credit for. Jane’s Revenge has admitted firebombing a pro-life medical office in Buffalo, New York, along with other acts of destruction in “16 cities throughout the U.S.”  But despite this the far-left group is referred to as “mysterious” in The Atlantic, and despite the real-world acts of violence and vandalism, the piece says this “does not imply the existence of a complex, coordinated campaign of violence.”

So when referring to people who have proudly taken credit for acts of extreme violence in the name of a political cause, namely the so-called right to murder unborn children, which is definitionally terrorism, the preferred adjective is “mysterious.”

When referring to people who reject the “Second Vatican Council’s reforms,” and make memes depicting their devotion to the Holy Rosary with the theologically valid understanding that the Rosary is a tool of defence in the war against evil, the preferred adjective is “dangerous.”

The piece fails to explain the reality of what it means to use the Rosary as a weapon, and instead implies that the understanding that it is a weapon against evil allows “radical-traditional Catholics literally to demonize their political opponents,” thereby allowing them to view “armed force against them [their opponents] as sanctified.”

The truth, of course, is that the Rosary has never and will never be a weapon to crush those who oppose the Church in the political realm, but rather, as a weapon to crush the influence of the devil.

In the traditional recitation of the Rosary, one prays 153 Hail Marys. That is to say, on 153 occasions the person asks for the Blessed Mother to “Pray for us sinners.” Not, “Pray for these sinners” or “Pray for those sinners,” but “us.”

When a Catholic prays the Rosary for the purpose of putting an end to the evil of abortion or any other ill condemned by Holy Mother Church, the Catholic is not asking God to kill or harm those who oppose Christ and His Church, but to have them convert and embrace His love! The Rosary is a weapon, but it does not have the goal of death. 

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