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Preface to the Second Edition

I will never forget my first attempt to pray the Rosary. I was a young Anglican priest working in England. Because I was from an evangelical background, I had a natural bias against any sort of Marian devotion. At the time, in my late twenties, I was going through a personal crisis, and as I headed off to a Benedictine monastery to make my retreat, a parishioner put a Rosary into my hand and said, “I think you need one of these, Father.”

When I arrived at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight, I looked at the Rosary and asked myself, “Why should I be right and a billion Catholics be wrong?” So I got a book from the bookstore on how to pray the Rosary and got started. That retreat was the start of a real transformation. Months later, when I had worked through the crisis, my spiritual director said very gently, “The prayers of Our Lady have helped you so much, haven’t they?” I was suddenly shocked into awareness. “Yes!” I said to myself. “It was when I began to pray the Rosary that I came into the crisis, and it was then that I found my way through the problems.” Up to that point I had not connected the dots and seen how the prayers of the Blessed Mother had been the catalyst to my inner healing.

It was another ten years before I came into full communion with the Catholic Church, but during that time I was introduced to the healing ministry of the Church through some very unusual priests. After becoming Catholic, I worked for a charity as a fundraiser and awaited the call to be a priest. I waited ten years. My timing was not God’s timing. Then, in 2005, the door opened for me to return to the United States to be ordained as a Catholic priest.

I had the chance to live for three months in a cabin in the woods in Greenville, South Carolina, while I waited for all the details for my ordination to come together. The cabin had been built by a Catholic woman I met years before when I was in college. She was a Benedictine oblate and a very devout and simple Catholic. While I was living alone in that cabin, I had plenty of extra time, and it was then that this book, Praying the Rosary for Inner Healing, was given to me. I say it “was given” because it almost wrote itself. The idea came to me in prayer, and each section of the book tripped off my fingers almost automatically.

Since then the book has helped thousands of people and has continued to be reprinted. Now, some twelve years later, I am pleased that it is going into a second edition with a fresh cover and an updated text. The book has been translated into Polish, Croatian, and French, and we would love to see it published in Spanish, Italian, and other languages.

The Christian faith is not just a theory or a good idea. It works. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God is transforming the world. He is doing this by transforming individuals into the likeness of Christ.

The process of this transformation is a long, hard journey. It’s the work of a lifetime. The first step of the journey is coming to realize that we need God’s help. Then we have to accept what God has done for us in Christ. Then, with God’s help, we embark on the adventure of faith. The end of our journey is what Jesus calls “abundant life.” This is a life of total healing. It is a life of fullness. It means becoming all that God created us to be. This is not just a possibility, but a command. If you’re a Christian, fullness of life and holiness is your calling.

We make the fastest progress on this journey on our knees. In other words, it is through prayer that we reach out for God, and he reaches down to heal us. The Rosary is one of the most effective and powerful ways to pray. As we pray the Rosary, God can heal us and transform our lives.

I hope as you learn to use this book that God will change your life by the redeeming work of Christ and through the love and prayers of the Mother of God and our Mother.

Father Dwight Longenecker

Greenville, South Carolina

Epiphany 2019