The Power of Prayer

In 1942, a young Father Patrick Peyton, CSC, founded Family Rosary with a profound desire to spread devotion to Our Lady, to strengthen families, and to sanctify homes in his adopted land. He took to the airwaves to spread this message as far and wide as he could using the most modern means of technology then available. We could look at his early success and praise his ingenuity and perseverance, but in fact, the roots of his mission went far deeper, and were strong enough to carry him through a lifetime in service to this unique call from God. 

I would propose that those roots traced back to a moment, one night perhaps, when the young Patrick Peyton, then a seminarian, desperately sick with tuberculosis, took a tremendous leap of faith and entrusted his care to God and the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary in way he had never done before. He had never been so sick before, never so deep in the dark night of physical and spiritual suffering. His mentor, Father Cornelius Haggerty, CSC had spent time in conversation with him that moved him to a point of conversion, yes even a conversion within a deeply faithful Catholic life. “You have the faith, Pat, but you’re not using it. You brought it with you from Ireland. Your mother gave it to you, just as her mother had given it to her,” he had said (Peyton, Patrick, CSC. All for Her, 2018.) 

Deeper Roots 

Here too we see reference to yet deeper roots. There are so many ways, explicit and implicit that parents can impart faith to their children. We know from Father Peyton that praying the Family Rosary had been an extraordinarily powerful way for the Peyton family to live their faith in the home. Mr. Peyton gathered the family nightly after dinner around the hearth to kneel and pray the Rosary together, a moment of unity, of peace, of entrustment of the day’s needs, and of thanksgiving for the gifts of God. It was also a time learning the language of our faith, so to speak.  

Meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary produced a memory, a familiarity, indeed a facility with important moments in the life of the Lord Jesus and His Blessed Mother. Coming to know these mysteries while growing in grace and strength—as did Our Lord himself in the holy house at Nazareth—gave every member of that family a way to unite their own joys and sufferings with those of Jesus Christ and Holy Mary. All of this came together to prepare the young Pat Peyton for the moment, grievously ill in a hospital, when he would entrust himself to God with a final confidence, pleading for the intercession of the Blessed Mother with an innocence of belief in what she could do before the throne of her Son and His Heavenly Father. He received a miraculous healing in the next days, becoming physically aware of it. He pledged to dedicate his life and his priesthood to spreading the Family Rosary. 

Family Rosary Today 

Today, Father Fred Jenga, CSC, the President of Holy Cross Family Ministries, has called for a renewal of that “founding innocence of belief in the power of prayer” within our ministry. Indeed, that’s what it was: pure and simple belief in the power of prayer. This call for renewal comes at a pivotal moment in our history and culture: a time when we are daily weighed down by statistics citing record low church attendance, loss of religious affiliation of any kind, increases in violence of all kinds, a drug overdose and homelessness crisis, and polarization and marginalization in every direction.  

Yet, in this dark night, there is a light: Jesus Christ who says, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). And we remember when he said, “Behold your mother” (John 19:27), to the beloved disciple, a reminder to all of us today that she is our mother too, a mother who does nothing other than bring us to her Son that He may save us in the darkness wherever He finds us. Just like Father Peyton needed God’s help on his sickbed, we too today, pushed often to our limits, must use that faith that we have and let ourselves be guided by Our Lady through our darkness to the hope that awaits. At Family Rosary, this is our mission: to give families that simple means of living their faith in their homes, a faith that will carry each member of that household through every chapter of life.