Rosary

Just three years after entering the Catholic Church, Holden Cole built Introibo, an app designed to help Catholics pray the Mass, Office and Rosary in Latin. Here, he explains why Introibo began with a problem. I wanted a single place to pray the Mass, the Office and the Rosary in Latin, and to follow the liturgical year as the Church has prayed it for centuries. I could not find exactly what I was looking for, so I built it myself. The reason I wanted those things, however, goes back much further. I was raised Methodist, though “raised” is a generous word for what we actually did. We prayed at home sometimes. We almost never went to church. What I had instead of a churchgoing childhood was my grandmother’s house. She was Catholic, and her home was filled with statues of Our Lady, so I grew up without much religion but also without the anti-Catholic streak that a lot of Protestants pick up early. Mary was just there. In the corner of the living room, the way other people grow up with a piano nobody plays, Our Blessed Mother stood watching over us. By the time I got to college, I would have called myself agnostic. I was not hostile towards Christianity; I was bored by it. I started seeing the bulletins around campus for Bible studies and St Mary’s Catholic Center and something called RCIA, and I would notice them and keep walking. I was a freshman in 2020, which meant my first year of college took place on a laptop on the desk in my bedroom. Like a lot of people that year, I felt hollowed out, and I started to wonder whether this was really all there was. One afternoon I was low. Not depressed exactly, but close enough that the difference did not matter. I was at my desk. Then I prayed, just once, figuring it could not hurt. I cannot remember whether I said the words out loud or just in my head. I have struggled ever since to describe what happened next. The best I can say is that there had been a hole in my chest, or maybe in my soul, and it was filled almost instantly. What filled it was not physical, though I felt it in my body. It was a kind of warmth and presence and peace that I had not asked for. I do not want to oversell what happened. There was no vision and no voice and nothing dramatic about it. But it was real, and it was enough to make me want to know what had just happened to me. For the next two years I read. I read about every religion I could find, beginning with the dead ones and working my way slowly inward towards the ones that were still alive, and from there through history and theology towards Christianity. I read the early Church Fathers. From Justin Martyr to Ignatius of Antioch and on through the rest of them, I saw something I had not expected. There was one Church, the same Church, that ran in an unbroken line from the Apostles down through the centuries and was still here. The Catholic Church was not a later development that had drifted from a purer original. It was the original. I joined RCIA at St Mary’s Catholic Center in my senior year at Texas A&M. I told myself, and I meant it at the time, that I was only there to learn and that I was not going to convert under any circumstances, that I was there to find the holes in the story and walk away. Halfway through, I had to admit there were none. The objections I had carried in from a Protestant frame of mind, the Real Presence, praying to the saints, all of it, kept dissolving the more I read. Aquinas helped me. The Fathers helped me more, and at some point I became the main obstacle. I had to admit that there is no faith without doubt, and that I was not going to know everything in this life with the certainty I wanted. I had to trust the Church. I had to trust the men and women who had been working through these questions for centuries before I was born, who were, frankly, wiser than I am. That kind of trust is humility, not a failure of reason. RCIA usually takes a full year, but I was about to graduate and move to Washington for graduate school, so I completed both parts at once. I was received into the Church on Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter, 17 May 2023. That day is also a Minor Rogation Day, one of three the Church has set aside for centuries to fast and beg God for His mercy in the days before the Ascension. Rogare , in Latin, means to ask or to beg. It is perhaps providential that my journey, which started three years earlier with asking, should result in my being received into the Church on a Rogation Day. For the first two years after my confirmation I went to the Novus Ordo and I was happy, because I was a Catholic and I was not looking for anything else. Then I went home to Florida to visit my mother and visited an FSSP chapel where the Traditional Latin Mass was offered. I did not like it the first time. I could not follow what was happening. I did not know when to stand or kneel. I felt as though I had wandered into someone else’s prayer by mistake, and I almost wrote the whole thing off as a bad experience. I went back because I had heard too many people I respected speak about the old Mass with too much love for me to dismiss it after one visit. The second time it was different, and by the third time something had given way in me. What drew me in was the reverence, from the Gregorian chant to the incense, from kneeling at the rail to receive Our Lord to the prayers at the foot of the altar and the dozens of smaller prayers along the way that I had not even known existed. I came to love Low Mass especially. The long silences gave me room to be quiet before God, and to let Him be quiet in return. Somewhere in those weeks I realised that the old Mass was the same discovery I had already made in my reading, only now I was making it on my knees. The continuity I had followed into the Church through Justin Martyr and Ignatius of Antioch was the same continuity I was kneeling within in that little chapel. The Roman Rite as I was praying it is one of the oldest continuously prayed liturgies anywhere in the world, with a Canon whose words were already ancient when St Gregory the Great put his hand to them at the end of the sixth century. Almost every saint I had ever read about or loved had been formed by this Mass. My grandmother’s favourite, Padre Pio, offered it every morning of his priestly life, and offered it so slowly and so seriously that people travelled from across Europe to watch him. St Thérèse of Lisieux, whose Story of a Soul I had read more than once and whose Little Way had quietly reshaped the way I thought about holiness, had heard this Mass throughout her short life and had been sanctified within it. To kneel at the same rail and to hear the same Latin and to pray the same Canon they had prayed was to pray with them. I started going every Sunday I could, and as I prayed I found that I wanted, more and more, to understand what I was actually praying. I wanted to follow the propers for the day. I wanted to know the feast and its rank and the season of the liturgical year. I wanted to learn the Latin, not as a performance and not to show anyone anything, but because the prayers themselves are old and beautiful and mean something exact that the English does not quite capture. What I wanted, in short, was one thing that put it all in one place: the Mass with the day’s propers, the Office, the Rosary in Latin, the texts side by side so that I could actually read what I was hearing. I looked. I could not quite find what I was looking for, so I built one for myself. I called it Introibo, after the first word of the prayers at the foot of the altar. Introibo ad altare Dei . “I will go in to the altar of God.” I built it because St Carlo Acutis used what he had for the love of God, and I wanted to use what I had in the same way. I would have been content if no one else in the world had ever downloaded it, because it is the app I use every day. It opens each morning to the liturgical day itself, and from there to the Mass, the Office, the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross in Latin, an examination of conscience, a library of traditional prayers, a small school for learning ecclesiastical Latin through the prayers themselves, and the practices of the saints to follow throughout the year. It is free. It works fully offline. There are no adverts, no accounts and no tracking of any kind. I had never built an app before this one. I am not a developer. My undergraduate degree from Texas A&M is in business and my master’s degree from Georgetown University is in finance, and the closest I had come was a few tools I had put together for work and school over the years, none of which had ever lived on anybody’s phone. Three years on from my confirmation, the Catholic faith is the most important thing in my life and I do not know who or what I would be without it. Everything I want now comes from one thing, which is to serve God and to follow His will in whatever way He gives me to do it. The app is a small part of that, and the Mass is a far larger part, but all of it traces back, in the end, to the same small prayer I prayed by accident in my dorm room six years ago, when I did not know what I was doing, and it turned out not to matter, because Someone was already listening.

The Church has long dedicated the month of May to Mary. Br René Stockman, former Superior General of the Congregation of the Brothers of Charity, reflects on how Catholics can use the month to renew their devotion to Our Lady and let her example transform their lives It remains a pious devotion to honour Mary in a special way during the month of May. Pilgrimages, praying the rosary together, reciting her litany, giving a special place to a statue of Mary: these are time-honoured customs that we would do well to uphold. Even in the most austere church, a statue of Mary will never be missing. The presence of debates on whether or not to officially recognise the title of Mary as Co-Redemptrix says something about the importance she had in the work of salvation. Even if it is not desirable to enshrine this in dogma, we can hardly deny her cooperation. There is only one person who may bear the title of Mother of God, because she brought the God-man Jesus into the world at the Incarnation. From this, a rich popular devotion has developed around the person of Mary, and countless images of her have been created. Pilgrimages to Lourdes, Fatima and other places where Mary once appeared continue to draw large crowds, and there we encounter the most diverse people. This is not a matter that attracts only simple, devout souls, or the sick who hope for a cure. It is striking that dioceses, which struggle to keep their parishes alive, with church closures and the repurposing of churches as an almost logical consequence, see remarkable success in their Marian shrines. After all, it is there that they can most easily and directly reach their faithful. Just as Mary was once the link between heaven and earth, she continues to connect us today. Here she certainly deserves a renewed understanding of her title as Mary Mediatrix. Mary enables people who are completely estranged from their church and parish life to reconnect with the faith through her. She never intended to be the end goal, but always the path to her Son: through Mary to Jesus. What St Louis de Montfort emphasised in his devotion to Mary at the end of the seventeenth century, Pope St John Paul II sought to depict on his coat of arms with the “M” of Mary pointing to the “cross” of Jesus. “Totus tuus,” entirely yours, was his motto, also a phrase from that same St Louis de Montfort with which he sought to express his total devotion to Jesus through Mary. The fact that the Reformation criticised the place Mary occupied in the Church – and that Vatican II therefore cautiously devoted only a chapter to Mary in its constitution “Lumen Gentium” and did not grant her a separate document – had precisely to do with the danger of forgetting Mary’s proper place and placing her alongside or even above her Son. That is why the expression “through Mary to Jesus” is the best formulation one can conceive of when speaking of Mary in our life of faith. From this we come to the question of what Mary can and may still mean today in our life of faith and, more broadly, in our lives as such. This will, of course, be interpreted by each person in their own way, but we may already cite a number of words and virtues that are particularly applicable to her. At the Annunciation, we encounter Mary as the devout woman who is open to the word of the Lord, listens to it patiently and manages to give this totally unexpected event a central place in her life. Her “yes” will sound to many today like a threat to personal freedom, and a curtailment of the self-determination that has become so important to so many. It puts an end to the myth that we can have total control over the course of our lives. We must indeed dare to take our lives into our own hands, actively participate in social life and strive to respond positively to the expectations placed upon us, but at the same time we must remain open to the unexpected that, as it were, befalls us, and discover new perspectives and challenges within it. In the language of faith, this means that, like Jesus himself, we must constantly ask ourselves what God’s will is in our lives, and realise that what unexpectedly befalls us may well be precisely what God is asking of us at that moment. Mary teaches us to recognise God’s hand in our lives and not to flee from events that occur outside our plans. People, circumstances and even setbacks can be placed in our path to help us discover our true calling. But often we only see in hindsight the positive impact this unexpected event has had on our lives. Mary accepts without seeing everything and without even understanding everything, but she trusts that God will not abandon her. Mary receives a special mission when she learns that she will become the Mother of God, but that does not affect her humility; quite the contrary. She calls herself the humble handmaid who lets it be done “according to Thy word.” Is humility not the most threatened virtue, and is the world not being damaged by people who consider themselves better than others? The pride and lust for power that stem from this are corrupting our society, and we see the consequences of this on both the micro and macro levels. What we see magnified in today’s tyrants, we also see all around us and, in all honesty, must often recognise in ourselves as well, or at least the tendency towards it. Pride, envy and arrogance are the dangerous trio that claim so many victims today. There is only one remedy capable of countering this: namely, humility, the antithesis of pride. With her boundless humility, Mary brings us back to the human being as we were created by God and of whom He said it was good. She helps us on our way to restoring the broken harmony within us and to truly becoming what we were created to be and what we are called to be: human beings in whom the likeness of God’s image may rise up within us. At the foot of her Son’s cross, Mary receives the commission to become the mother of all who wish to walk with Him. She is a mother who does not flee from suffering but excels in compassion. Entering St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the first thing one encounters is Michelangelo’s famous Pietà. Beyond the immense artistic value of this sculpture, it radiates above all the compassion of a woman who takes her dead son into her arms and wordlessly calls on us to become compassionate people as well. Extreme suffering can only be eased by the presence of fellow human beings who do not abandon those who are suffering. The greatest suffering experienced by the elderly stems from the feeling that they no longer matter in society and have been abandoned by everyone. It is a loneliness that leads them to the desperate question of whether they are still wanted in this society and whether it would not be better to end their lives. When, as a child, I regularly visited an elderly great-aunt at the nursing home where she lived, I was deeply moved by an even older woman whom I always saw sitting with a rosary in her hand and who told me that Mary was her only comfort. In addition to the example of compassion that Mary radiates, she has evidently taken very seriously the mission she received from her Son to become the mother of many, of all, and has given and continues to give shape to this in many ways. For that elderly woman who had no one left, there was only Mary, who remained close to her in a mystical way and kept her company. The encounter with that woman left a deep impression on me and also strengthened my devotion to Mary. Perhaps this month of May can be an excellent opportunity to give Mary a place in our lives in a renewed way. Through Mary to Jesus.