Canada July 18, 2019
Ottawa hosting Rosary Bowl: ‘There can never be too much of Mary’
By Deborah Gyapong
OTTAWA (CCN)—On Aug. 22, the feast of the Queenship of Mary, thousands of pilgrims are expected to gather at Lansdowne Park for a Rosary Bowl on the site of the 1947 Marian Congress.
Now called TD Place and the home of the Ottawa Redblacks football team, Lansdowne Park was the site of the historic 1947 Marian Congress that drew hundreds of thousands of Ottawa for what was then the largest religious gathering of its time in Canada. It was also where Canada was first consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an act that Canada’s Catholic bishops repeated at Ottawa’s Notre Dame Cathedral in Sept. 2017.
The Rosary Bowl will take place from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the stadium. Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Ottawa, and Bishop Pierre-Olivier Tremblay of Trois-Rivières and rector of Canada’s national Marian Shrine at Notre-Dame-du-Cap in his diocese will both deliver short addresses, then the Queenship of Mary sisters and the Corpus Christi Catholic School Rosary Club will lead the praying of the Rosary.
“Our people often tell me of their joy in proclaiming their faith publicly as we do with the Way of the Cross on Good Friday and as we did with the Marian procession in 2017,” Archbishop Prendergast said. “They are also pleased when the archbishop accompanies them, so it’s a double blessing to be part of this at Lansdowne Park, where the Marian Congress took place 72 years ago.”
“The fact that TD Place officials are positive about it encourages the Catholic community, so I’d like to support that openness on their part,” he said.
“My hope is that it will show there is still interest among Catholics and perhaps others to honour Our Blessed Mother and interest too in praying the Rosary for peace in our world – which is so needed,” the archbishop said. “The Rosary Bowl, on the eighth day after the Assumption is a wonderful complement in the English sector of our local church to the Grotto of Notre Dame in Vanier, where especially Francophones gather in large number.”
“St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Marian Doctor of the Church, says that Mary always leads us to her son, for through Mary we go to Jesus ‘per Mariam ad Jesum,’” he said. “If this is so, I pray with Bernard we will discover that there can never be too much of Mary.”
Rosary Bowl organizers Dennis and Angelina Girard co-founders of the Marian Devotional Movement have included the event as part of a four-day pilgrimage beginning in Ottawa Aug. 21, then on to Notre-Dame-du-Cap on Aug. 23-24.
Dennis Girard said they decided to call the event the Rosary Bowl after a similarly-named annual event in Portland, Ore.
But the Girards subsequently discovered that the Venerable Father Patrick Petyon, famous for his maxim “The family that prays together stays together” had a booth at the 1947 Congress and held the first-ever Rosary Bowl in Canada in 1948 in London, Ont.
Dennis Girard pointed out 2019 is the 325th anniversary of the establishment of an altar to the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary at Cap-de-la-Madeleine, at the original church on the site of the Marian Shrine. The Confraternity is an ancient prayer movement the Holy See entrusted to the Dominicans 500 years ago.
The Girards have been working with Bishop Tremblay and the National Shrine to revive the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary by encouraging members to join and enabling those who sign up electronically to be included in the Shrine’s register.
In 1867, Father Luc Desilets discovered a small pig chewing on a rosary inside the old shrine at Cap-de-la-Madeleine. He was able to retrieve the beads and turned and saw the Confraternity altar, long in disuse. He vowed to enroll as many people as possible. He also revived the ancient practice of blessing roses and encouraging parishioners to pray with them, asking Our Lady for favours. They kept a record of the healings and favours granted.
The little church built in the 1600s became too small for the thousands Desilets enrolled in the Confraternity. Plans were made for a new church, and in the summer of 1878 the stones were dressed and ready on the other side of the St. Lawrence, waiting for the river to freeze over so they could be carted across.
The winter of 1879, however, the St. Lawrence never froze. Father Desilets and parishioners prayed the Rosary until an ice-bridge, a rosary of ice floes, began to form after March 14. The local people reinforced the bridge and began carting the stones over on March 18, continuing until March 25, the Annunciation of Our Lord.
The Girards’ home parish of Blessed Sacrament has revived the practice of blessing roses. Dennis Girard described enrollment in the confraternity, praying the Rosary and the blessing of roses as a “recipe for renewal” in Canada. “We’re building a bridge of rosaries, enrolling people in the confraternity from around the world to renew the universal prayer of the Church.”
The Girards’ goal is to hold Rosary Bowls yearly. “By the time we get to 2022, we hope to fill the stadium to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Marian Congress.”
They also envision replicating the procession of the pilgrim statue, a replica of the miraculous statue at Notre-Dame-du-Cap, along the Rideau canal to Lansdowne Park, accompanied by tens of thousands of pilgrims.