We continue to experience this intercession today because we keep winning battles with this powerful weapon. But that is not the most important victory or help: what is crucial is that through the meditation of the holy rosary, we advance on our spiritual path.

When Jesus ascended to heaven, the disciples gathered in the Upper Room around the Virgin Mary. When we pray the rosary, we do the same: we gather as a Church around our Mother in Heaven. From Mary’s perspective, we meditate on the mysteries of Jesus’ life, and through this, our own lives begin to be shaped by those crucial moments. 

Mary’s heart is the privileged place to understand the life of Christ, and our own lives change as we join in this contemplation. Just as Jesus’ human body was formed in Mary’s womb, so our soul and our lives are shaped within Mary, and praying the holy rosary is one of the best ways to allow her to act within us. She teaches us to look at Jesus and contemplate him while affirming our identity as her children and as brothers of Jesus.

The rosary has four sets of mysteries: Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful and Glorious. These four stages of Christ’s life correspond to the four stages of spiritual life that every Christian goes through: consolation, purification, illumination and final union with God.

The stage of consolation is reflected in the Joyful Mysteries. By recalling the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and his birth, we celebrate that the Word became flesh to accompany us, to console our humanity and weakness. As Bishop Munilla says: “The great news is that our heart does not belong to the one who broke it, but to the one who repaired and rescued it.” In other words, our heart belongs to God because he has come to rescue us from the sad prison wrought by sin. We suffer from the consequences of evil, from a lack of meaning, from the experience of death. Our great relief and consolation is that God came to stay with us, to accompany us and to pour out his mercy.

However, God’s plan does not stop at receiving the consolation we need. He has prepared something much greater and more magnificent: that we become saints. He knows that to sanctify us, he must purify us because the path to holiness requires us to go through a crisis to detach ourselves from the bonds that hold us to a carnal way of living. 

Many times our hearts do not desire God’s plan, as happened to Peter when Jesus rebuked him saying, “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” (Mt 16:23). Peter tried to keep Christ from the path of the cross because he still had a human and carnal perspective. However, Christ knows that the cross is absolutely essential for the consolation we receive to be not superficial but to achieve a deep and true purification of our souls. In other words, without the cross, there is no true redemption or liberation. The blood of Christ is what has redeemed us from our sins, and that blood is found at the foot of the cross. 

Seeking consolation without purification is closing the heart to the gift of Jesus Christ himself. Jesus is the best of teachers and knows our souls perfectly; he offers each of us the kiss of consolation, and when the moment is right, he leads us by the hand through the path of purification. This is what the Sorrowful Mysteries are about: it is how Christ detaches us from our ego, from our plans, from our carnal way of seeing life. All of this is painful, but the cross is the path that conforms us to the Father’s will.

However, the path to holiness is not only about suffering and the cross; it also involves illumination. Spiritual theology teaches us that through revelation, God illuminates our souls, allowing us to see things from His perspective, so that we understand His designs. On this path of illumination, it is essential to turn to the sacred Scriptures, to know them deeply because they are the best source of illumination.

“The heart of God is the Bible,” said St. Augustine, precisely because that is where we come to know the Lord and where we enter into relationship with him. The more we come to know who God is, the more our lives are shaped by his perspective, his way of doing things, his manner of being. The Luminous Mysteries refer to that stage of clarity and understanding of the divine mysteries that are necessary to advance in the truth.

The path followed after reaching the illuminative stage culminates in the spiritual marriage between God and the soul. Many saints, such as Sts. Teresa of Jesus, John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena and others refer to this as “the mystical marriage.” By this time, we have experienced the consolation of having God with us; we have gone through our Calvary and died to our ego; we have achieved the illumination of the truth. 

Then, we awaken from the dark night and are ready for the marriage that Christ longs to have with us. The most beautiful thing is that he marries our smallness with the wounds he himself has consoled, purified and illuminated. In the Glorious Mysteries, we contemplate the marriage between God and his Church during the day of Pentecost through the Resurrection.

Just as the Apostles gathered in the upper room during the feast of Pentecost, today we gather as the Church. There we say to Mary, “Mother, your Son has ascended to heaven.” Then our mother places the rosary in our hands so that we learn to see Christ in each mystery, to encounter him and follow him on the path that will lead us to the eternal marriage with his Sacred Heart.