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The Secret of the Rosary

but the King of angels and men, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Saint Cyprian says that it was
fitting that our Savior by Whom we were reborn into the life of grace should also be our heavenly
Master and should teach us how to pray.
The beautiful order, the tender forcefulness and the clarity of this divine prayer pay tribute to
our divine Master's wisdom. It is a short prayer but can teach us so very much and it is well
within the grasp of uneducated people, while scholars find it a continual source of meditation on
the mysteries of our Faith.
The Our Father contains an the duties we owe to God, the
acts of all the virtues and the petitions for all our spiritual and
corporal needs. Tertullian says that the Our Father is a sum­
-mary of the New Testament. Thomas l Kempis says that it surpasses all the desires of all the
saints; that it is a condensation of all the beautiful sayings of all the Psalms and Canticles;  
that in it we ask God for everything that we need; that by it we praise Him in the very best way;
that by it we lift up our souls from earth to heaven and unite them with God.
Saint John Chrysostom says that we cannot be our Master's disciples unless we pray as He did and in
the way that He
showed us. Moreover God the Father listens more willingly to the Prayer that we have learned
from His Son rather than those of our own making which have all our human limitations. We should
say the Our Father with the certitude that the eternal Father will hear it because it is the
prayer of His Son Whom He always hears and we are His members. God will surely grant our -
petitions made through the Lord's Prayer because it is impossible to imagine that such a
good Father could refuse a request couched in the language of so worthy
a Son, reinforced by His merits, and made at His behest
Saint Augustine says that whenever we say the Our Father
devoutly our venial sins are forgiven. The just man falls seven times a day, but in the Lord's
Prayer he will find seven petitions
which will both help him to avoid downfalls and will protect
him from his spiritual enemies. Our Lord, knowing how weak and helpless we are, and how many
difficulties we get into, made His :Prayer short and easy to say, so that if we say it
devoutly and often we can be sure that .Almighty God will
quickly come to our aid.
I have a word for you, devout souls, who pay little attention
to the prayer that the Son of God gave us Himself and asked us all to say: It is high time for you
to change your way of

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