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Dear Friends in Christ,

Eleven years ago this month, the Faithful of Atlanta gathered at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to celebrate that year's Rosary Rally. I mention this in order to recall what was in the minds and hearts of all good Catholics at that time. The first thing was that we found ourselves as a nation on the brink of war - war in the Persian Gulf, war on behalf of the people of Kuwait, who faced an aggressive invasion of their homeland by the armies of Iraq. And the second thing on the minds of people, as they addressed their special prayers to God through Mary, was thanksgiving. For just that week, the dying Soviet Union, voted unanimously to grant freedom of the practice of religion in Russia and throughout what remained of the USSR. For more than seventy years, Catholics across the globe had praying faithfully, for the conversion of Russia. In the historical perspective we can now understand, that the conversion of Russia, where the Faith had never died, could mean but one thing - the death of the regime that had sought to strangle the practice of religion - the regime that had sought the death of living religion, even as it faced its own death and oblivion, bowed to the inevitable, and before the witness of the nations, before the witness of time, and in humble surrender before the sovereign and inexorable will of God, that regime, with its last breath, freed the people of Russia, of Poland, of Hungary and Estonia and Latvia, and dozens of other nations, to practice once again, the faith of the Fathers, the faith of the Saints and Martyrs, the Faith of our one and forever Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of Mary. It was a triumph, and it was an answer to the long and steady prayers of millions. But even so, with this victory in the air, the air was still filled with the ominous rumblings of war - and none of us knew what it might mean, to carry our arms, and to send our men and women into combat, for the freedom of a tiny state far away, in the desert of the East, and the uncertainty of a little known culture, the culture of Islam. And now, just eleven years later, here again, we the Faithful of Atlanta stand gathered before our Lord, and before His Mother Mary, again poised on the brink of war, engaged once more in conflict - conflict which storms far from these peaceful hills of North Georgia, but a conflict born in the terrible wounding of our nation, of our nation's cities and airways, and born in the deaths of thousands of innocent people, who barely had a moment to say farewell, and then their voices were silenced forever, and lost in the grief of the families and loved ones they left behind. Where will our victory be this time? Will it be in freeing the Afghans people from the tyranny of a religion gone crazy? Will it be in what many construe as the righteous balancing of the scales of war, and the proper defense of our people and our nation? Will it be in the rescue of the world from the unexpected and insidious catastrophes, wrought by fanatical zealots, to fill the world with terror, and to bring down whatever stands opposed to their extreme and cruel practices? We do not know the answers to these questions - we do not even know who will live to see the answers, and who will die with the questions still poised on their lips. But we know where to look for the answers, where to ask for the answers - and even if they are not given, we know where to find the comfort and the strength necessary to continue our way of life, our way of worship, our steadfast and noble faith, the faith of God's people, processing through time and through the currents of a storm-tossed world. We look to the Sacraments for strength, we look into the word of God in Scripture for truth, and we look in prayer, for the peace and courage to meet what may come our way. This is what our Lady teaches us when we pray with her the holy Rosary - for as we step with her along the path that she walked with her Divine and human Son, we realize, as she did, that we are all engulfed in a strong and tumultuous wind, blown through the world by the wings of the Holy Spirit - and we learn, that life is not tragedy or triumph, but tragedy and triumph - that the way to salvation is blended from the vintage wines of joy, sorrow, and glory - and that the Rosary, the holy Rosary, is the elixir, the medicine, the refreshing draft, blended from the three, which enlivens our hearts, and fills us with the exhilaration of wisdom. Our Lady, at the end of her life on earth, was not a fractured vessel of isolated incidents in her own life and the life of her Son. She was a totality, a unity, an encompassing, in which were contained the joy of birth and youth, the sorrow of pain and death, and the glory of rising, ascending, and being assumed into the eternity of God on High. We must understand that our lives, in the context of the personal and the social, in the framework of our individuality, of our professions, of our families and friends, and of our Church - our lives too, are a unity of tragedy and triumph, and that no joy we experience can attain to eternal glory, unless it passes through sorrow, knowing the weight and pain of shouldering the Cross, with our Lord, who loved us so much, who gave us so much. Dear friends, this, and these, are the mysteries we learn from the Rosary - the Rosary which St. Dominic carried as a shield before the violence of heresy - the Rosary, invoked as their protection by the warriors who sailed into the great Battle of Lepanto - the Rosary held in the hands of our Lady at Lourdes, as she revealed the evidence of God's love in healing waters - the Rosary, which our Lady at Fatima has implored the world to say every day, so that souls may be saved, from the terrible evil which drags many into perdition and endless night. Dear friends, let us cling to this holy chaplet, this garland of lights, this noble procession of images from the lives of our Lord and Lady, and let us find understanding for the questions of our own lives, and for the questionable events of our own times, in what we hear, in what we feel, and in what is revealed to us, as we lay bead upon bead, decade upon decade, mystery upon mystery, and cast ourselves, time and time again, upon the refrain of God's mercy, taught us from the mouth of His own Mother on earth: O Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all the souls to Heaven, especially those who are most in need of Thy mercy. Amen.

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