The Rosary
A Catholic devotion counting sets of prayers while meditating on events in the life of Christ.
The Rosary is a structure rather than a single prayer. It counts decades on beads, each decade an Our Father, ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be, while the person praying holds in mind one of the mysteries, an event from the life of Christ or of Mary.
There are four sets of mysteries. The Luminous mysteries were added by John Paul II in 2002, which makes them recent enough that many older devotional books do not include them.
It is prayed alone, in groups, and at wakes, where a rosary said beside a body is a common form of vigil.
Why the words are not here
Its component prayers are held here individually, from named public-domain editions. What is not published is a sequence or an instruction for praying it, which would be guidance about practice rather than a text.
Every text on this site names the edition it came from and was checked against it twice. A prayer nobody can cite an edition for does not get printed here, however well known it is. The verification record lists what was held back and why, and how rights are established explains the test.
What we do hold
- The Lord's Prayer (Douay-Rheims)
- The Hail Mary (Baltimore Manual 1889)
- Salve Regina (Baltimore Manual 1889)
When people look for this
The moments this prayer is associated with. Each page carries cited guidance on how different traditions meet that moment.
Where it belongs
This page describes a prayer and, where we hold one, prints a named edition of it. It does not tell you whether to say it, or when. That judgment belongs to someone credentialed in the tradition, and nobody has signed anything here.