Our Lady’s Psalter: The Rosary of the Mystery of Christ
Translated by Fr. Marco Testa
ISBN 978-0-9880692-0-6
Cost: $10. Proceeds benefit the pro-life movement.
Father Marco Testa, a priest in the Archdiocese of Toronto, has published a beautiful 63-page pocketbook with which to pray the Rosary: Our Lady’s Psalter, The Rosary of the Mystery of Christ.
Fr. Marco explains that the Rosary originated in monastic times, between the 14th and 15th centuries. Dominic of Prussia, a Carthusian monk, composed meditations or clauses (clausulae) summarizing the principal mysteries of the life of Jesus, which would be recited after the Holy Name of Jesus. Dominic’s “contribution to the development of the Rosary emphasized its use as an aid to meditative prayer rooted in Sacred Scripture” and, unlike “the Dominican Rosary which assigns particular mysteries to different days of the week, the Clausular Rosary consecrates a particular mystery of the life of Jesus to each Hail Mary.” (Our Lady’s Psalter, p. 13). The clausulae in this collection appear in Latin and English and are the oldest known; the identity of their writer is uncertain.
The volume includes a section on how to pray the clausular Rosary and each of the Psalters has 50 meditations. “Praying the Rosary like this brings one to the contemplation of the Mystery of Christ, with a definite Marian perspective and emphasis, [and] the format of the book…facilitates prayer in Latin or English and brings together the different traditional elements of a prayer that over the centuries has evolved and which still today continues to form the faithful in the Gospel.”
Father Marco said he felt called to write about this ancient form of the Rosary as it is “eminently suited to the observance of the Year of Faith” and weds “the old with the new.”
Purchase online or at Crux Books (Toronto), St. Joseph’s Workshop (Mississauga), or order in bulk from liturgical.latin@live.ca.