The History of the Rosary: Originally the rosary had 150 beads; one for each psalm in the Bible, and in the twelfth century religious orders recited the 150 Psalms as a way to mark the hours of the day and the days of the week. At that time there was a very low level of literacy and the praying on a string of 150 beads or knots for the general population began as a parallel to praying the psalms and remembering the Lord and his mother throughout the day. The "Divine Office"; the official prayer of the church; is the recitation of the psalms over a four week period, and is still prayed today. The Hail Mary owes its origin to the rosary. When people said the rosary in the twelfth century, Gabrielle's greeting "Hail Mary, full or grace, the Lord is with thee" was often said along with the Our Father. Elizabeth's greeting "blessed are you among women" was added at a later date. The words "Holy Mary., Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death" were added in the sixteenth century. In the fifteenth century, a Carthusian monk divided the rosary into fifteen brackets (or decades) and a Dominican monk assigned mysteries to each of the decades. These mysteries were events in the life of Jesus as written in the gospels. By meditating on these events even the illiterate could know the stories in the Bible. These decades were the same as ours except for the last two Glorious mysteries. In those two, the Coronation and the Assumption together made up the fourteenth decade and the fifteenth decade was the Last Judgment. On October 16, 2002, Pope John Paul II, declared 2003 to be the "Year of the Rosary", and for the first time in centuries a change was made in the rosary. The Pope added and defined 5 new mysteries concerning events in the public life of Jesus. These new mysteries are called the "Luminous Mysteries" or "Mysteries of Light" Today's rosary is comprised of twenty decades of the Hail Mary, separated by an Our Father and a Glory Be and sometimes the Fatima prayer. The complete rosary is broken into four sets: The Joyful Mysteries, The Sorrowful Mysteries, The Glorious Mysteries, and the Luminous Mysteries. One set is prayed on a rosary that has five decades and each set is prayed on designated days of the week.
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