If you spend any time in Catholic circles online, you may have seen the images: small groups gathered across Ireland, Rosary beads in hand, kneeling in prayer in the public square.
The images came from the recent Rosary Rallies organised by the Irish Society for Christian Civilisation and its Ireland Needs Fatima campaign. According to campaign coordinator Gregory Murphy, 586 rallies took place across the country, with an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people taking part.
For Mr Murphy, however, the significance was not only the number of rallies, but the willingness of Catholics to make prayer visible again. “To have that large of public manifestations spread across the country is a small miracle,” he told The Irish Catholic.
The reason for praying publicly, he said, has deep roots in Catholic tradition. He pointed to St Louis de Montfort, who promoted Rosary rallies in France, and argued that public prayer has always been part of the Church’s response in difficult times.
Mr Murphy said: “The theological root comes from St Louis de Montfort, who’s the one that really started Rosary Rallies during his lifetime in France to combat public sin. There’s a famous quote from his book The Secret of the Rosary, where he says public prayer is far more powerful than private prayer to appease the anger of God and to call down his mercy. And Holy Mother Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, has always advocated public prayer in times of public tragedy and suffering. Today you could add public tragedy, suffering and chaos.”
Public prayer, he said, is also rooted in Christ’s warning not to hide a candle under a bushel.
“So many people have lost the faith or aren’t Catholic because they don’t routinely see the Catholic faith in the public square,” Mr Murphy said. “We need that externalisation of our internal principles, our internal values, to reinforce those principles.”
The rallies, he said, are also a sign of renewed interest in Marian devotion. “People are rediscovering the value of devotion to Our Lady because in this day and age of chaos, of wars, people are looking for solutions,” he said.
This devotion, he made clear, ultimately must lead people more deeply into the life of the Church: “When you honour Our Lady more, the more you become in love with the Church and with God as well. By honouring the mother, you honour the son.”
This, he said, is why the Rosary remains so important:
“The Rosary is something that any lay Catholic can pray, no matter how far away they are from the church, or how often they have the opportunity to go to Mass,” he said. “The Rosary is really a weapon, a spiritual weapon for them to use.”
This is something Ireland Needs Fatima encounters beyond the rallies. The group also carries out home visits across the country, arranged weeks in advance, with families inviting friends to gather as a statue of Our Lady of Fatima is brought into the home.
“We would go to the home and they would have invited family and friends, and we do a presentation on Fatima,” Mr Murphy said. “An hour and a half to two hours long, depending, and then sometimes it goes on for three hours with questions.”
Through the Fatima home visits, he said, the campaign often meets people who pray the Rosary daily but have not been to Mass “in months or years”.
“But because of that devotion to the Rosary, Our Lady keeps a very strong link with those faithful and brings them back, if they keep progressing, to bring them back to the Church,” he said.
“The Rosary rallies are really a means to rekindle the devotion to the Rosary that Ireland always has, but has suffered so many blows through the crisis in society, through the crisis in the Church, through the scandals, through Covid as well,” said Mr Murphy.
The hope now, he said, is that Rosary rallies and processions become “a very common thing in Ireland, not just in May”.
More practically, he said the rallies give local Catholics “experience and equipment” to organise public prayer again, while also connecting people across the country who want to promote devotion to Our Lady of Fatima.
“So that we can make an organised movement towards Our Lady of Fatima in Ireland,” he said.