Busacca Gallery

A beautiful Handmade Decorative Antique Crucifix. Each bead is hand-carved, 19th-century. "Necklace Handcrafted Devotion Monk Rosary Wood Holy Cross". This is a gorgeous and very special antique rosary wooden necklace it is very long. The holy cross and beads are beautifully detailed and have a great carved design motif. The rosary (from Latin rosarium, meaning "Crown of Roses" or "garland of roses") is a Roman Catholic sacramental and Marian devotion to prayer and the commemoration of Jesus and events of his life. The term "Rosary" is used to describe both a sequence of prayers and a string of prayer beads used to count the prayers. The word is sometimes written with an initial capital in a Catholic context.

For over four centuries, the rosary has been promoted by several popes as part of the veneration of Mary. The rosary also represents the Roman Catholic emphasis on "participation in the life of Mary, whose focus was Christ," and the Mariological theme "to Christ through Mary," taught by Saint Louis de Montfort. The sequence of prayers is the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary ten times, and the Glory Be to the Father, sometimes followed by the Fatima Prayer. Each sequence is known as a decade. Five decades are prayed, after beginning with the Apostle's Creed and five initial prayers. The praying of each decade is accompanied by meditation on one of the Mysteries of the Rosary, which recall the life of Jesus. The traditional fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary were standardized based on the long-standing custom by Pope Pius V in the 16th century. The mysteries are grouped into three sets: the Joyful mysteries, the Sorrowful mysteries, and the Glorious mysteries. In 2002 Pope John Paul II announced a set of five new optional mysteries called the Luminous mysteries, bringing the total number of mysteries to twenty.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosary

Knotted prayer ropes were used early in Christianity; the Desert Fathers are said to have created the first such, using knots to keep track of the number of times they said the Jesus prayer.

According to pious tradition, the concept of the rosary was given to Saint Dominic in an apparition of the Virgin Mary during the year 1214 in the church of Prouille, though in fact it was known from the ninth century in various forms. This Marian apparition received the title of Our Lady of the Rosary. In the 15th century it was promoted by Alanus de Rupe (aka Alain de la Roche or Blessed Alan of the Rock), a Dominican priest and theologian, who established the "fifteen rosary promises" and started many rosary confraternities.

The practice of meditation during the praying of the Hail Mary is attributed to Dominic of Prussia (1382–1460), a Carthusian monk who termed it "Life of Jesus Rosary". The German monk from Trier added a sentence to each of the 50 Hail Marys, using quotes from scriptures (which at that time followed the name "Jesus," before the intercessory ending was added during the Counter–Reformation). In 1569, the papal bull Consueverunt Romani Pontifices by the Dominican Pope Pius V officially established the devotion to the rosary in the Catholic Church.