The "Love Your Enemies" Rosary

A path to personal forgiveness

[This is an unpublished post from March 7, 2022, but it’s so important and so timeless that I’m publishing it here right now.]

Since I’m renewing my Marian Consecration, for the most part, I’m giving all the graces of the Rosary to her. But I want to mention a very special way to pray the Rosary that I recently discovered: I call it the “Love Your Enemies Rosary.”

Instead of asking for a grace at the beginning of the Rosary or after announcing each Mystery, I pray for the salvation of specific people with every repetition of the Hail Mary.

But instead of praying for the people I love, my friends and family—as most of us usually do—I pray for those I can’t stand, those I want nothing to do with, those I actively avoid being around.

And not just in some roundabout way, which would make this prayer much easier but also much less powerful… no, I pray for every single one of them by name. As I do, I visualize them and really try to focus on them. It’s too easy to chicken out otherwise.

The only requirement for the “Love Your Enemies Rosary”: Each one of the people you pray for must be someone who has wronged you, hurt you, or doesn’t like you, someone you had an argument with or don’t see eye to eye with in some way, someone whose actions or words you have felt annoyed or bothered by, or someone you simply can’t stand. This includes all levels of enmity, from mild annoyance to full-blown hatred, and all levels of enemies—from your friend you had a small quarrel with to the person who has wounded you so much that you were traumatized for the rest of your life.

Now, I don’t have that many “enemies” to fill a whole Rosary, so I include people I know through social media, political figures, religious figures, and celebrities; people I currently deal with as well as people from my past, dead or alive.

It goes like this:

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Holy Mother, in this Rosary, I pray for the salvation of those named. Please spread your blessings upon them.

Apostles Creed

Our Father

Three Hail Marys

Glory Be

First [Joyful] Mystery: The Annunciation

For Jack Smith

Hail Mary

For Hannah Miller

Hail Mary

For Joe Biden

Hail Mary

For Nancy Pelosi

Hail Mary

And so on.

Fr. Chris Alar from the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, says that you can pray even for the salvation of those who have already died…because while we mere mortals are bound to the limits of time, God has no such restrictions. He can retroactively save even those who were unbelievers and have already passed. So let’s pray for them, says Fr. Chris. That’s what I do.

Because let’s be honest—even if we’re doing okay on the Ten Commandments, most of us are struggling with Jesus’s request to love and forgive our enemies. By us praying for their salvation and asking for blessings on their behalf, forgiveness is implied.

But most of all, this helps us to be lifted out of sin. It is a natural cure for the spiritual condition that is called “hardness of heart.”

When I pray the Rosary like this, I can feel my heart soften as I’m saying the words. Forgiveness and goodwill are sneaking in and taking the place of resentment and anger.

And if you keep doing it (I recommend praying this at least once a month), over time, the defensive walls we all have built around our fragile hearts break down and leave you open and fully receptive to God’s grace.

By itself, the Rosary is an incredibly powerful spiritual weapon, but this version is so effective because while you pray for the salvation of specific people, it simultaneously frees you from resentment and unforgiveness.

I can sense that it aggravates and enrages Satan like nothing else. It packs a double punch: by praying it, we save others and ourselves at the same time.