Oct. 7 is the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

I am unsure whether the Rosary is protected by the First or the Second Amendment.

In the past because of my benighted views, I might have considered it merely a religious expression, and thus covered under the First Amendment. The first right enumerated in the Constitution is, after all, freedom of religion. The Constitution guarantees “free exercise of religion.” Which means I can pray the Rosary in church, on the street, in my bed or at an abortion business.

This year, however, I learned from The Atlantic that my rosary might not fall just under the First but also under the Second Amendment. Daniel Panneton opened my eyes to the “weaponization” of the rosary. 

Now, I thought that “weaponization” was a term only used by select cardinals and applied to the Holy Eucharist when one opposed its sacrilegious distribution to Catholics who publicly promote abortion. Silly me!

I must admit, however, that the “weaponization” of the rosary has posed new questions for me.

I often carry my rosary in in my pants pocket and finger it as I walk down the street or sit on the subway. Does that mean I’m carrying a concealed weapon?

I really need to know because I live in an area where 11 contiguous states require permits for concealed carrying of weapons and I must confess: I don’t have one.

Several of those jurisdictions also ban weapons in certain venues, so I need to know whether I should empty my pockets when I visit the library.

The large Dominican rosary might qualify as an assault weapon. If it is, then I think we need to investigate the radicals over in the Order of Preachers. After all, does anybody really need the kinds of high-capacity decades they tote around on their cinctures? After all, they even admit that they wear those assault rosaries on their belt’s left because that’s traditionally where men carried swords and “the rosary too is a weapon.” By the way, that statement appears on a website aimed “at the man discerning a friarly vocation within the Dominican Order,” so it’s clearly an effort to recruit even more violent extremists! 

Let me state publicly: In no event will I accept any such rosary from friends at St. Vincent Ferrer in Manhattan, because I know that New York City requires a license to bear weapons, and I don’t have one.

(Full disclosure: The rosary I carry is an ordinary one received in the mail from the Franciscans. Wait a minute: Did I just implicate the sons of Francis in a federal crime for sending a weapon through the U.S. mail? Mea culpa!) 

Our parish often prays outside the abortion business still performing its bloodletting in my town. In light of recent events, I also need to know whether using the rosary at that venue might violate the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. After all, am I giving an FBI SWAT team probable cause to visit me at dawn? Or does praying it just threaten to put my rosaries on somebody’s ovaries, against which I am warned annually by a coterie of students on Jesuit Georgetown University’s campus when I go to the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life? 

We tell owners to be careful with their weapons, e.g., in a security box or locking cabinet. Does that mean we need to get Catholics to remove their rosaries from car rearview mirrors?

Finally, although the upcoming weekend is a three-day holiday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just reopened the border, the ride north would be replete with fall foliage and it’s Thanksgiving in Canada, I’ve decided not to drive up to Montréal — mostly because I don’t want to risk my weapon being confiscated at the border in St. Bernard Lacolle.

How to solve this? Congress needs immediately to draft and pass ERRATA — the Ending Rosary Radicalism, Anarchy, and Terrorism Act! ERRATA should include provisions to identify and surveille dangerous groups like rosarians!! Don’t let those white septuagenarian women fool you: the feedback I hear is that they’re pretty loud in their rosary radicalism, which either means they’re unabashedly undermining our secular norms or their hearing aid batteries need replacement. 

Or take the Knights of Columbus: pretty clearly a militia-type group (“knights”) identifying with a dead white European male oppressor of BIPOCs. When they say the Rosary corporately, you can practically hear the dogma living within them! Passing ERRATA and codifying abortion through birth clearly ought to be priorities of the lame-duck Congress after Nov. 8. 

We live in interesting times.

Now, the real paradox is that, in one way, Daniel Panneton got it right. The rosary is a Catholic sacramental. It is also a weapon. Our Lady gave it to St. Dominic to defeat evil. He used it to suppress the Cathari heresy — an anti-body, gnostic heresy that would in many ways feel very much at home in today’s America — which had raged across southern France. 

At the Battle of Lepanto, in today’s Greece, an outnumbered Christian force prevented 120,000 irenic Turks who happened to be out sailing that day aboard 275 ships from peacefully proselytizing the rest of Europe. The Catholics attributed their victory to the fervent praying of the Rosary, at the urging of Pope Pius V, for their success against the jihad aimed at Western Europe. Indeed, the Rosary honors she who is “full of grace” whose role in salvation history is already pronounced in the first pages of the Bible where, in the Protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15, she is the one who crushes the ancient serpent’s — the devil’s — head. 

In her multiple apparitions — La Salette, Giertrzywałd, Lourdes, Fatima — she has made it clear that the Rosary is her weapon of choice in the achievement of that defining act to which truly human progress tends, the true justice to which the arc of history inexorably bends.

So, my fellow Catholics, on this feast, let us deploy our secret weapons for the purpose our celestial Quartermistress handed them out: to crush the evil debilitating our souls, our societies and our world.