Alan Frost takes a look at Fr. Donal H. Calloway’s new book ‘Champions of The Rosary’.
A new book about the Rosary by an American priest, Fr. Donald H. Calloway, to honour the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Dominican Order, aims to “recap and pick up where St. Louis-Marie de Montfort left off” because “people today need to know about the weapon capable of combatting and conquering immorality and evil”.
That weapon is a ‘spiritual sword’ created by God, the ‘Divine Craftsman’. The author (noting the decline in the devotion post-Vatican II) maintains that ‘a priest without a rosary is like a knight without a sword’.
But it is not only priests who wield this spiritual sword. And there have been numerous periods when saying the rosary fell into decline. But the practice has always recovered, through inspirational figures, many martyred in the process.
Of these heroic figures he selects twenty-six as the ‘Champions of the Rosary’, each identified in a particular way.
These Champions are examined in the second part of the book, the first dealing with pertinent events in each century, down from the antecedents of the rosary before the time of St. Dominic. The third part of the book, particularly taking St. Louis de Montfort as a model, is a practical and analytical address of the praying of the Rosary in the modern day.
