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The interminable, relentless rosary marred our childhood

Family Fortunes: We prayed for what seemed like every relative we had ever had

“But if the rosary itself was bad, then the ‘trimmings’ were 10 times worse. Oh, how we hated it.” Photograph: iStock

Maureen Duckenfield
Fri Jun 16 2017 - 06:00

There was scarcely a family in Ireland that wasn’t touched by the rosary. The procedure began when, to the utter dismay of the family, Mum would declare that it was time for the rosary.

In our house we kneeled after dinner. My mother used to “give it out”, but in order to keep us kids focused, we were often asked to take our turn with this process. The pressure, oh the pressure, to remember the titles of each decade.

But if the rosary itself was bad, then the “trimmings” were 10 times worse. They came relentlessly at the end of the rosary. Oh, how we hated it. We moaned, protested, cried and finally we knelt around the kitchen chairs, starting upright, with a cushion, if were lucky, and quickly leaning back on to our heals, heads lowered into our arms, cursing the fact that we were there, all the time fiddling with the cushion, a pen, the dog, the rosary beads, anything to relieve the boredom.

We grudgingly mumbled the prayers but we knew that at the end of the five decades, we were only halfway through. We prayed for what seemed like every relative we had ever had, that they would all be brought up to heaven. We prayed for our pope and bishop, the saints, I’m not sure why. We prayed for the health of a good share of the parish, too.

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Finally escaping from the rosary in our own house, we had to run the gauntlet when we called to our friends

When we thought we had finished we still had to pray for anonymous people who requested our prayers. God help them, they didn’t get much. And then there were the Holy Souls. All of our dead relations seemed to fall into this category, the ones waiting to get into heaven. There were the sick, the lonely, and the dying, not to mention the ones taking exams.

Finally escaping from the rosary in our own house, we had to run the gauntlet when we called for our friends to come out to play. It was always with trepidation that we knocked on our neighbour’s door, as there was a very good chance that we would walk in on another rosary with even longer trimmings. Refusing to go into someone’s house when the rosary was in full swing was not an option. It was an unwritten rule that if you were caught, you dropped to your knees and put up with it all over again.

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