Three Minutes with Newman
Prayer of the Rosary, Newman’s Advice to Children
November 23, 2024
John Henry Newman’s journey with the rosary can be traced back to an intriguing discovery from his childhood. In his Apologia pro vita sua he recounts that close to the age of ten, he sketched an image of rosary beads in one of his copybooks. This early and seemingly simple drawing, made during his formative years as an Anglican child, foreshadowed the profound role that Marian devotion would later play in his life.
As an Anglican he learned to honor Mary, but it was only when he became a Catholic that he prayed to her, and learned to recite the rosary.
The Oratory School and the Rosary
As an educator and founder of the Oratory School, Newman not only integrated the rosary into the school’s daily prayers but also took a personal interest in teaching its value to the boys. He organized communal rosary prayers, encouraging the students to adopt this devotion as a habit of both discipline and contemplation.
Address to the Boys on the Rosary
In one of his addresses to the students for the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary (1879), Newman emphasized the power of the rosary to guide them through life’s challenges. He began telling them that this prayer has a “soothing sweetness that there is in nothing else.”
He told the boys that “that it makes the Creed into a prayer; of course, the Creed…and brings them nearer to our hearts. And so we contemplate all the great mysteries of His life and His birth in the manger; and so too the mysteries of His suffering and His glorified life.”
The then old cardinal told the boys that when they grew up and faced the difficulties of life they would remember their own home, and he encouraged them to think of the Holy Family: “you ought to have in the Holy Family a home with a holiness and sweetness about it that cannot be found elsewhere.”
Newman advised the boys to consider all the members of the Holy Family: “And when I speak of the Holy Family I do not mean Our Lord and Our Lady only, but St. Joseph too; for as we cannot separate Our Lord from His Mother, so we cannot separate St. Joseph from them both; for who but he was their protector in all the scenes of Our Lord’s early life?”
This integration of the rosary into the spiritual formation at the Oratory School reflects Newman’s broader vision of the person: nurturing faith through intellectual engagement and heartfelt devotion, rooted in both personal experience and community practice.
In Wilfrid Ward’s biography of Newman we have an account of his last years. In it we read of Fr. William Neville’s memories. He recounted that when Newman because of his poor eyesight was no longer able to recite the Office to which he was greatly attached, he cherished the prayer of the rosary:
“… by the advice of Bishop Ullathorne, he substituted the Rosary in its stead. What the Rosary became to him under these new circumstances, those can imagine who know what his attachment to the daily Office had been; his ready reply to a condolence on his loss of the power to say it being, that the Rosary more than made up for it; that the Rosary was to him the most beautiful of all devotions and that it contained all in itself.”
Let us learn from Newman, and other saints such as Padre Pio, Josemaría Escrivá, Mother Teresa and John Paul II, to love Mary and cherish the prayer of the Holy Rosary.
