The Pro-Life Rosary: Just Press 'Play'

LIVING THE PRO-LIFE MY STERIES hosted by Barbarea McGuigan EWIN Home Video 240 minutes. $30 To order: (800) 854-6316 or www.ewtn.com

The truth about the sacredness of life is under constant assault in our world. Who better to show Christians — we who are “in the world, but not of the world” (John 17:16) — a way through the morass of the culture of death than Mary, Mother of the Author of Life?

So asks pro-life educator Barbara McGuigan in Living the Pro-Life Mysteries, a three-part video series from EWTN featuring a presentation of the rosary as “a catechism of pro-life truths.”

“Join me on a journey through the mysteries of the rosary,” McGuigan says, “where we will learn to value the sacredness of human life as we learn to see humanity through the eyes of our Blessed Mother.”

McGuigan, a singularly cheerful and vibrant speaker, begins her pro-life rosary journey at the Annunciation and Mary's assent to God's will. “Saying ‘Thy will be done’ with your whole heart is the primary cause of happiness and peace,” she says before re counting her own “Yes” to life and its defense.

Her story is remarkable in its ordinariness. She was teaching a confirmation class in her parish when the director of religious education asked her to give a talk to the candidates, parents and sponsors about the sacredness of life. With six weeks to prepare, McGuigan began studying abortion, something she'd never done before. She found the subject so depressing that she thought about giving up. Then she came across a magazine article on the subject of fetal pain. These facts — the horrific reality of the unborn baby's agony during abortion — gave her the courage to stand up for life. “God does not call the qualified,” she says, “but he qualifies the called.”

The easy familiarity of McGuigan's story can encourage other “ordinary people” that they, too, can study the facts of abortion, give a presentation, defend life in a discussion with a co-worker and pray for an end to abortion. “Anyone who prays or offers up their suffering to try to bring about the culture of life, I consider you to be an activist, too,” she says.

Relating the rosary's sorrowful mysteries to the difficulties inherent in living one's pro-life convictions, McGuigan points out: “These mysteries are a philosophy of suffering. They encompass the five deepest causes of all of suffering, for Christ shared in all our suffering: fear, pain, rejection, exhaustion and dying.” Here she shares how painful she's found it to see women she's counseled go ahead and have abortions anyway, and to hear fellow pro-lifers deny the abortifacient nature of some contraceptives.

McGuigan arrives at the glorious mysteries like a runner approaching a prize. Life triumphs. Resurrection is restoration. She urges us never to give up on anyone, including ourselves. “How often do we hear people say, ‘Don't waste your time teaching chastity to those teen-agers — they're going to do it anyway’ or ‘There's no hope for her, her life's a mess’? People who say such things are believing in a dead Jesus. But he is risen to restore us so we can continue to carry out our mission in life.”

Despite a couple of minor annoyances — the sound quality is uneven and McGuigan wanders from her point every now and again — Living the Pro-life Mysteries is a triumph in its own right.

With Barbara McGuigan as teacher, anyone with an open heart and a clear mind can learn from Mary's prayer, the rosary, how to live for life — which is the only truly human way to survive and thrive in a culture that often seems to love death more than its alternative.

Una McManus writes from

Alexandria, Virginia