Pope’s invitation to pray the rosary
Pope Francis has invited people around the world to pray the rosary every day, during the month of October, a month the Church dedicates to Our Lady. The Pope has asked to his Worldwide Prayer Network (formerly known as Apostleship of Prayer) to share this request.
Fr Frederic Fornos SJ, Director of the Worldwide Prayer Network, says, “During these last years and months, we in the Church have lived through difficult situations, among these abuses of sex, power and conscience on the part of clerics, consecrated persons and lay people. As well as internal divisions. The mission of evangelization of the Church has been discredited by our complicity.” It is against this backdrop that the Pope has made this special request.
Francis has also asked that at the end of the rosary people pray the traditional prayers to St Michael the Archangel along with the ancient invocation to the Holy Mother of God, ‘Sub Tuum Praesidium – ‘Under Your Protection’.
‘Under your protection We fly to Thy protection, O holy Mother of God; Do not despise our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin. Amen
Pope Francis asks that people pray to Our Lady in this time of crisis, so that the Church may become ever more aware of the faults, the errors and the abuses committed in the present and in the past, and spare no effort in combating those abuses so that evil may not prevail, including evil directed against the Church itself.