An Interview with Producer Matt Swaim about "The Eucharist and the Rosary"

Aquinas and More Books has been kind enough to interview yours truly about my new book, "The Eucharist and the Rosary." The full interview is on their website, but here's an excerpt:

As a convert to the Catholic faith, do you think you have a unique view of the rosary and its relation to the Mass? If so, how?

It would be cocky to say my view of the Rosary and the Mass are unique; the baggage related to these prayers tends to fall into a couple of categories. Either you have baggage like the post-Vatican II anti-traditionalists who think that the Rosary is an embarrassing Catholic ID card from a bygone age, or you have baggage like I did as a semi-fundamentalist Christian, that praying the Rosary was a form of idolatry that piled up unnecessarily repetitive prayers. The fact of the matter is, as I point out in one of the appendices, that there is a fundamental difference between meditating within and meditating without.

The Church calls us to meditate on that which is greater than ourselves, while new-age and other Eastern forms of meditation call us to focus within ourselves. Anyone honest can see that the focus of one’s meditation becomes the focus of one’s worship, so we can easily see that inward-focused meditation worships a false god we perceive to be inside of ourselves, while outward-centered meditation brings us heavenward into the greatness that calls us outside of ourselves. When we pray the Rosary, which forces us to focus on someone holier than us, namely, Jesus, through the experiences of someone holier than us, namely, Mary, we are snapped out of our narcissistic realities. That is the most formative thought that I have been provided with through my own praying of the Rosary and my own experience of the Mass.

Read more here.