I am not going to make a long address to you or say anything that you have not often heard before from your superiors, for I know well in what good hands you are, and I know that their instructions come to you with greater force than any you can have from a stranger. 

 

If I speak to you at all, it is because I am sent by Holy Father Francis, and am his representative. So, in the years to come you may remember that you have seen me, heard me speaking in his name and remember it to your profit.

 

You know that today we keep the Memory of our Lady of the Rosary. And how that devotion came about; how, at a time when heresy was very widespread, and had called in the aid of sophistry, that can so powerfully aid infidelity against religion, God inspired St. Dominic to institute and spread the devotion of the Rosary. It seems so simple and easy, but you know God chose the small things of the world to humble the great (I Cor. 1,27-28).

 

Of course, it was first of all for the poor and simple, but not for them only, for everyone who has practiced the devotion knows that there is a soothing sweetness in it and nothing else. It is difficult to know God by your own power, because He is incomprehensible. He is invisible to begin with, and therefore incomprehensible. We can in some way know Him, for even among the heathens there were some who had learned many truths about Him; but even they found it hard to conform their lives to their knowledge of Him. 

 

And so, in His mercy He has given us a revelation of Himself by coming among us, to be one of ourselves, with all the relations and qualities of humanity, to gain us over. He came down from Heaven and dwelt among us, and died for us. All these things are in the Creed, which contains the chief things that He has revealed to us about Himself.

 

Now the great power of the Rosary lies in this, that it makes the Creed into a prayer; of course, the Creed is a prayer and a great act of homage to God; but the Rosary gives us the great truths of His life and death to meditate upon, and brings them nearer to our hearts. 

 

And so, we contemplate all the great mysteries of His life and His birth in the manger; and so, to the mysteries of His suffering and His glorified life. But even Christians, with all their knowledge of God, have usually more awe than the love of Him, and the special virtue of the Rosary lies in the special way in which it looks at these mysteries. For all our thoughts of Him are mingled with the thoughts of His Mother, and in the relation between Mother and Son we have set before us the Holy Family, the home in which God lived. 

 

Now the family as humanly considered, is a sacred thing and how much more the family bound together by supernatural ties that is the Holy Family in which God dwelt with His Blessed Mother.

 

This is what I should most wish you to remember in future years. For all of you will have to go out into the world, and going out into the world means leaving home and we don't know what will be the world. It is not wrong for you to look forward to that time; but most men who knew the world find it a world of great trouble, disappointments, and even misery. If it turns out so to you, seek a home in the Holy Family that you think about in the mysteries of the Rosary.  

 

I most earnestly ask you to make the Holy Family your home, to which you will turn to from all the sorrow and care of the world and find a solace, a compensation, and a refuge. And this I say to you, not as if I should speak to you again, not as if I had of myself any claim upon you, but with the claims of the Holy Father, whose representative I am, and in the hope, that in the days to come you will remember that I came among you and said it to you. 

 

And when I speak of the Holy Family I do not mean Our Lord and Our Lady only, but St. Joseph too; for as we cannot separate Our Lord from His Mother, so we cannot separate St. Joseph from them both. May you throughout your life find a home in the Holy Family; the home of Our Lord and His Blessed Mother and St. Joseph.