Our Lady's Rosary Makers is a non-profit Catholic apostolate in
Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville ( , , ) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the 28th most-populous city in the United States. Louisville is the historical seat and, since 2003, the nominal seat of Jefferson County, on the Indiana border ...
, USA dedicated to spreading devotion to the
Virgin Mary
Mary; arc, ܡܪܝܡ, translit=Mariam; ar, مريم, translit=Maryam; grc, Μαρία, translit=María; la, Maria; cop, Ⲙⲁⲣⲓⲁ, translit=Maria was a first-century Jewish woman of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph and the mother of ...
and the
Rosary
The Rosary (; la, , in the sense of "crown of roses" or "garland of roses"), also known as the Dominican Rosary, or simply the Rosary, refers to a set of prayers used primarily in the Catholic Church, and to the physical string of knots or ...
. According to the OLRM Web site, its 17,000 members, in the U.S. and other countries, make and distribute roughly seven million cord and chain rosaries annually for
missions around the world, and have distributed hundreds of millions of rosaries to Catholic missions worldwide.
["Our Lady's Rosary Makers", Access date: July 17 2012]
/ref>
History
The organization traces its roots to Xaverian Brother
The Xaverian Brothers or Congregation of St. Francis Xavier are a Roman Catholic religious institute founded by Theodore James Ryken in Bruges, Belgium, in 1839 and named after Saint Francis Xavier. The institute is dedicated to education.
His ...
Sylvan Mattingly (1882-1951), who in 1949 started making rosaries and formed a rosary-making club, which he originally named Our Lady of Fátima
Our Lady of Fátima ( pt, Nossa Senhora de Fátima, ); formally known as Our Lady of the Holy Rosary of Fátima) is a Catholic title of Mary, mother of Jesus, based on the Marian apparitions reported in 1917 by three shepherd children at the ...
Rosary Making Club, at St. Xavier High School.[Rutherford, Glenn. "Rosary makers hope to interest the young", ''The Record'', January 16, 2013, Archdiocese of Louisville]
/ref> Over the years, this club grew to become Our Lady's Rosary Makers.
Present day
The plastic components are produced locally. The organization both packages and ships supplies for rosary makers requesting them, and fulfills requests for rosaries already made."Kentucky group provides rosary-making supplies locally, globally", ''Tennessee Register'', May 14, 2021
/ref>
The core of Our Lady's Rosary Makers operation is the bimonthly newsletter ''Our Lady's Messenger'', which reaches approximately twenty thousand people. By 2013, they averaged filling 6.5 million orders a year for rosary making supplies.[
The bulk of the newsletter is a section called "Request for Rosaries": Catholic ]missionaries
A missionary is a member of a religious group which is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thomas Hale 'On Being a Mi ...
worldwide in need of rosaries write to Our Lady's Rosary Makers asking for their names and addresses to be published in the newsletter. The newsletter also includes news and feedback letters from missionaries. There are also requests for Rosaries from prison and hospital chaplain
A chaplain is, traditionally, a cleric (such as a minister, priest, pastor, rabbi, purohit, or imam), or a lay representative of a religious tradition, attached to a secular institution (such as a hospital, prison, military unit, intelligence ...
s, religious educators, etc.
The members of Our Lady's Rosary Makers are mostly in the U.S. The makeup and characteristics of the members are diverse: some are working adults, some are blind or otherwise disabled, some are elementary school students, while others are in retirement homes. When members receive the bimonthly newsletter, they look through the list of missionaries who have requested rosaries; then make and send packages of rosaries to them. There is no central control; members select missionaries from the newsletter, and missionaries wait until packages of rosaries arrive.
Notes
External links
Our Lady's Rosary Makers
Our Lady's Rosary Makers of Western Michigan
Our Lady's Rosary Makers of Australia
{{Authority control
Catholic lay organisations
Our Lady of Fátima
Non-profit organizations based in Louisville, Kentucky
Christian organizations established in 1949
1949 establishments in Kentucky
Religious organizations based in Louisville, Kentucky