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Forty-Seventh Rose

ness which often blinds even the most enlightened souls; you are surrounded by evil spirits who
being more experienced than ever and knowing that their time is short are more cunning and more
effective in tempting you.
It will indeed be a marvel of grace wrought by the Most Holy Rosary if you manage to keep out of the
clutches of the
world, the devil and the flesh and avoid mortal sin and gain heaven! If you do not want to believe
me, at least learn from your own experience. I should like to ask you if, when you were in the
habit of saying no more prayers than people usually say in the world and saying them the way they
usually say them, you were able to avoid serious faults and sins that were grievous but which
seemed nothing much to you in your blindness. Now at last you must wake up, and if you want to live
and die without sin, at least mortal sin, pray unceasingly; say your Rosary every day as members
always used to do in the early days of the Confraternity.
When our Blessed Lady gave the Holy Rosary to Saint Dominic she ordered him to say it every day and
to get others to say it daily. Saint Dominic never let anyone join the Con­
fraternity unless he were fully determined to say it every day. If today people are allowed to be
Ordinary Members by saying the Rosary merely once a week, it is because fervor has dwindled, and
charity has grown cold. You get what you can out of one who is poor in prayer. "It was not thus in
the beginning.'
Three things must be stressed here; the first is that if you want to join the Confraternity of the
Daily Rosary and share in the prayers and merits of its members, it is not enough to be enrolled in
the Ordinary Rosary or just to make a resolution to say it every day; as well as doing this you must
give your name to those who have the power to enroll you in it. It is also a very good thing to go
to Confession and Holy Communion especially for this intention. The reason for this is that the
Ordinary Rosary Membership does not include that of the Daily Rosary, but this latter does include
the former.
The second point I want to make is that, absolutely speaking,
it is not even a venial sin to fail to say the Rosary every day, or once a week, or even once a
year.
The third point is that whenever illness, or work that you have performed out of obedience to a
lawful superior or some
real necessity, or even involuntary forgetfulness has prevented you from saying your Rosary, you do
not forfeit your share in the merits and your participation in the Rosaries of the other

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