Rosary rally draws big crowdWritten by Jill K. Dion Thursday, October 16, 2008
With rosary beads in hand, about 150 people gathered outside Christ the Redeemer Church Saturday to pray to God to save America.
The rally, called a “Public Square Rosary Crusade,” was part of a national campaign spearheaded by the America Needs Fatima organization and organized locally by Christ the Redeemer parishioner Ed McCormick.
Attendees came from Christ the Redeemer and other area churches. There were retired people, families, teens and children.
“America is mired in problems — problems in leadership, public scandal and sin, bad economy, terrorism, etc.,” states literature that teenagers distributed in the church parking lot. “Men cannot resolve them. God can. But He has been cast out. It’s time to beg God, ‘Return to America.’”
Speakers and attendees spoke of politics and morality. They mentioned a state court ruling one day earlier that gave homosexuals marriage rights equal to their heterosexual peers, a move the Catholic Church opposes.
“We join thousands and thousands of people in prayer,” said church pastor, the Rev. Cyriac Maliekal, as the prayer ceremony got underway.
The priest prayed that peoples’ faiths hold strong and that government leaders have the ability to solve the nation’s problems.
He prayed for the “end of abortion, same sex marriage and pornography,” and he prayed that those who do sin be brought back to the path of God.
Fingers touched rosary beads as the attendees recited the Our Father and other prayers of the Catholic Church. Some cried.
Helen Rusanowsky, one of the residents in attendance, said the rally was as much political as religious to her.
She prayed for America to fight socialist tendencies. “I don’t think the founding Fathers had socialism in mind,” she said.
Her friend, Marion Healey, said she would pray for the end to abortion.
Megan Allen, who attended with almost a dozen family members, said she planned to pray for the church, for “unity in the country, in the world and for all the priests.”
The Lady of Fatima organization and the Public Square Rosary Rally historically unite politics and religion. Followers cite the occupation of a section of Austria by communist Russians after World War II and maintain that a rosary crusade expelled the communists in 1955.
“The Rosary saved Austria,” states literature that the rally organizers distributed. “Why not America? Secularists seek to drive God from society, but a Rosary Crusade can help expel the secularist mentality from America.”
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