ROSARY

(from Latin rosarium, rose garden), religious exercise in which prayers are recited and counted on a string of beads or a knotted cord. By extension, the beads or cord may also be called a rosary. The practice is wide-spread, occurring in Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. In Christianity, the practice was adopted in the 3rd century by Eastern Christian monks, and various forms of the rosary were developed. In Roman Catholicism, the rosary became a popular method of public and private prayer. The most common rosary is the rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the prayers of which are recited with the aid of a chaplet, or rosary. The beads of the chaplet are arranged in five decades (sets of 10), each decade separated from the next by a larger bead. The two ends of the chaplet are joined by a small string holding a crucifix, two large beads, and three small beads. In its most widespread form, the rosary of the Blessed Virgin requires three turns around the chaplet. It consists of the recitation of 15 decades of Hail Marys, each Hail Mary noted by holding a small bead. Each decade is preceded by the Lord's Prayer (a large bead), followed by the Gloria Patri (Glory Be to the Father), and accompanied by a meditation, or mystery. The 15 mysteries are events from the life, death, and glorification of Jesus and Mary; they are divided into three sets of fivethe joyous, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries. The introductory and concluding prayers of the rosary vary. The origin of the rosary of the Blessed Virgin is not certain, although it has been associated with St. Dominic, founder of the Dominican order in the early 13th century. The devotion probably developed gradually among the unlettered as a substitute for the recitation of the psalms or the divine office. It reached its definitive form in the 15th century through the preaching of the Dominican Alan de la Roche and his associates, who organized Rosary Confraternities at Douai in France and at Cologne. In 1520 Pope Leo X gave the rosary official approbation, and it was repeatedly commended by the Roman Catholic church. Since the 1960s, however, public recitation of the rosary has become rare. In Eastern Orthodoxy the rosary is almost exclusively a monastic devotion. The kombologion (chaplet) used among the Eastern Orthodox of Greece and Turkey has 100 beads of equal size. The Russian Orthodox vertitza (string), chotki (chaplet), or lievstoka (ladder) is made of 103 beads, separated into irregular sections by 4 large beads and joined together so that the lines of beads run parallel, thus suggesting the form of a ladder. In the Romanian church, the chaplet is called matanie (reverence) because the monk makes a profound bow at the beginning and end of each prayer counted on the beads. In Islam the rosary is an act of piety. It consists of counting 33 beads and requires three turns around the chaplet. Each bead represents one of the most beautiful names of Allah found in the Qur'an, for a total of 99.