By Nancy Levine
On the Feast of the Annunciation in 1634, on a little island in the broad river that separates watery southern Maryland from Virginia, a Jesuit priest celebrated the first recorded Roman Catholic Mass in the English-speaking colonies of North America. Father Andrew White and his little company—two other Jesuits, more than 150 Catholic and Protestant settlers, and the colony’s governor, Leonard Calvert—had landed earlier in the month, after a hazardous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in their ships, the Ark and the Dove. With them, they brought a relic of the True Cross, given to them by a member of the British royal family. They called their landfall St. Clement’s Island, and they named the river after St. Gregory.
Today this area is St. Mary’s County, the Mother County of the Catholic Church in America. Down the river—it’s called the Potomac these days—is St. Mary’s City, which these first settlers built on land bought from Native Americans. In Terra Mariae, Mary’s Land, Catholics persecuted in England found a refuge, under the patronage of Governor Calvert’s brother, Lord Baltimore. Their new colony would be founded on the principle of religious toleration.
On March 25, 2003, the congregation of Holy Angels Church, the mainland parish that includes St. Clement’s Island, remembered and celebrated, as they do every year. And they have added something of their own, a Living Rosary.
Some parishes pray a Living Rosary with giant beads, others with tableaux. The one at Holy Angels has a different twist.
Those of us who were there for the first time watched curiously as the Knights of Columbus laid a rope of light bulbs the length of the aisle and back again, starting from a large cross in front of the altar. As the western stained glass window flamed with the sunset and then darkened, the people were asked to move into the center aisle. (One person to a light bulb, the reader told us. Pick up your light bulb. Carefully! And after the Rosary, when you put your bulb down, do it very carefully.)
We recited the Creed together. Then the Knights moved from bead to bead, tightening a bulb in its socket for each prayer—blue ones for the Mysteries, white ones for the Hail Marys. With each white light, the reader named a state; with each blue light, a continent. The person holding the newly lit bulb began the prayer, and the congregation gave the response. One after another the lights came on, until we had formed a glowing wreath.
The Living Rosary is a Rosary for Life. For each mystery, there is a prayer: for expectant fathers and mothers, for doctors, for those who have had an abortion. We prayed for healing, repentance, and a deeper recognition of the sanctity of life.
After the Rosary came the Mass of the Feast of the Annunciation. And then the Knights entered in procession, carrying a plain, heavy cross of logs. After the colony’s first Mass, 369 years ago, recalled Fr. White, “we took upon our shoulders a great cross, which we had hewn out of a tree, and advancing in order to the appointed place . . . we erected a trophy to Christ the Saviour, humbly reciting on our bent knees the Litanies of the Sacred Cross, with great emotion.” Now the Knights raised the cross before the altar. And, just as those first settlers had, we knelt and prayed the Litany. Foundation of the Church, Save us, O Holy Cross.
The Living Rosary that we prayed at Holy Angels was devised by
parishioner Millie Huseman; the meditations and prayers are by Priests
for Life and by Raymond Dion of the Fr. Andrew White Assembly of the
Knights of Columbus. For years, the Living Rosary has been prayed in October, at the Blessing of the Fleet, either at St. Clement’s Island or at a Marian shrine on the mainland—perhaps the same place where Fr. White began his evangelization of Native Americans. For the past eight years, the Rosary has also been part of the Annunciation Mass at Holy Angels.
In January 2003 a delegation from Holy Angels went to Zambales, Philippines, to attend the World Marian Congress. There, they helped adapt the Living Rosary for the Philippines, with its more than 70 provinces. The hope at Holy Angels is that the Living Rosary will become a truly global prayer of repentance, hope and love.
[For further information about Southern Maryland’s historic Catholic sites, write to Holy Angels Rectory, Avenue, MD 20906.]
(Nancy Levine, an Editor, writes from Washington, DC.)
