SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE LUMINOUS MYSTERIES

A MESSAGE FOR ROSARY SUNDAY

It seemed in 1972 that the Rosary was to escape the fate of the Holy Apostolic Mass and remain in its traditional form unscathed by the modernists.  Even Paul VI, a confirmed modernist himself, referred to the wise distribution of the Rosary into three cycles, representing “the joy of the messianic times, the salvific suffering of Christ, and the glory of the risen Lord.”  He confirmed the correspondence between the 150 Hail Marys of the Rosary and the 150 psalms of the scriptural Psalter, and flatly refused to upset the symmetry and significance of the Rosary’s format.

And then came John Paul II.  To be fair to him, the changes he introduced to the Rosary were not as sweeping as those envisaged by Annibale Bugnini.  The destroyer of the Mass had planned to reduce the Our Fathers to only one at the very beginning of the Rosary, to chop the Hail Mary in two so that only the first half would be recited on each bead, and then have the second half said only after the tenth Hail Mary of each Mystery.  At least we were spared that desecration of our Lady’s gift.  However, the entire symmetry of the Rosary was essentially annihilated by John Paul’s introduction of his “luminous mysteries.” No longer could a Rosary made up of two hundred Hail Marys claim to be the Psalter of Our Lady, and even worse, the Rosary would lose its triune element of joys, sorrows, and glory, a feature which represents a perfect reflection of the Redemption Story as well as our own life experiences.

God is a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  Our very life is a trinity of joys, sorrows and eventual glory.  Where does the notion of “illumination” come into play to destroy this triple symmetry and give the Story of Redemption a separate fourth element? The Freemasons like to place an all-seeing eye into their triangular symbol of God, thereby introducing a fourth element into the Holy Trinity.  Could these deceptively innocent “luminous mysteries” be the equivalent of that all-seeing eye of the Illuminati, an attempt to enlighten the Catholic Church so long “enslaved in the darkness of superstition” (faith)?

It does not require a conspiracy theory, however, to know that the “luminous mysteries” have no place in our contemplation of the story of our Redemption.  While the Church always encouraged individuals to meditate on the many other events of our Lord’s life, and even use the Rosary to do so, the introduction of an institutionalized change to the structure of the Rosary was never envisaged.  It was our Lady’s Rosary, transmitted to us from heaven and through the ages as an instrument for our sanctification and confirmation in grace.  All its mysteries are “luminous” in that sense, and bring to us the message of light and darkness, joy and sorrow, contained in the story of our Lord’s life and death.  They enlighten us with the faith, hope and love to live in the peaceful acceptance of these joys and sorrows that God permits, all for the sake of the eternal glory that will be ours if we do so.  Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries together present to us the single source of God’s Light, who is Christ, and who illuminates our darkness and saves us from the fires of hell.  There is no place for any other kind of mystery to interject itself into this perfect plan.