Many Protestants who become Catholics pass through three stages in their Marian devotion. They begin by thinking the Rosary is not something bad, as they had supposed; they next come to think it is very good; and finally, with experience and as their faith grows, they may see that it is very powerful.
As today falls between the Feast of the Holy Rosary and the memorial of St. John Henry Newman, I want to write on Newman and the Rosary.
I see nothing of this progression in him, but rather a recognition of the great goodness of the devotion from his earliest days as a Catholic. And yet he feels keenly the difficulties that other converts have with it, and he counsels them wisely. Writing less than three years after his own conversion, he advises the Marquise de Salvo: “You know perfectly well that devotion to the Most Blessed Mother of God is not imperatively required of all. It is a gift which God gives to those whom He will. I do not see therefore that a person ought to force himself into the use of particular manuals or exercises which do not come natural to him.”
But he goes
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