Customer Reviews

The Most Holy Rosary

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This CD is the best! Very dignified, very beautiful background music does not get in the way and distract. All ten Hail Mary's spoken for ALL the mysteries, including the new Evangelical mysteries introduced by John Paul II October 2002: Baptism of Jesus, Temptation in the Wilderness, Transfiguration, Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, Last Supper. Plus 2nd CD talks ABOUT the rosary at length with interesting information and insights. Cannot recommend highly enough!

My wife and I have been and still are great fans of Dr. Hahn's literary work. Both he and his wife have this great ability to explain difficult theological concepts in simple ways for most of us to understand and more importantly to remember so that we in our turn are able to explain aspects of our faith to those who ask us.

I remember reading "Rome Sweet Home", their conversion story, which then made me interested in reading other works by other authors such as Cardinal Ratzinger a.k.a. Pope Benedict as well as Patrick Madrid who among other things is also the editor for the great "Surprised By Truth" series. After reading other Scott Hahn books like "The Lamb's Supper", "Hail Holy Queen", and "Living the Mysteries", I chanced upon this audio cd version of the rosary which I assumed had the new "luminous" mysteries but I was disappointed; these are called the "evangelical mysteries" and are only suggested themes by Scott Hahn perhaps just before the official "mysteries of light" were released by the Vatican.

While, naturally, the Joyous and Glorious Mysteries remain the same, the Evangelical Mysteries are listed as: The Baptism of Jesus, The Temptation, The Transfiguration, The Triumphal Entry and The Last Supper. Only the first and last items on this list are identical to the official Luminous Mysteries and the others: Jesus Works His First Miracle, Jesus Preaches and The Transfiguration respectively replace Scott's other items.

So be warned that you are not getting the Luminous Mysteries but an invention of Scott's called the Evangelical Mysteries here probably because this was released prior to the Vatican definition of the Luminous Mysteries. The other thing that bothered me was the sound quality of the recording which was pretty poor; this is especially so for the second disc featuring discussions by Scott on various issues that Catholics are commonly challenged with by our non-Catholic brethren.

The sound quality of the main course, the rosary itself, is a little better. I also tried to use this in one of my RCIA groups when teaching the enquirers how to say their first rosary but then I found that the speed of Scott's recitation of the prayers is too fast as well. I had to stop the cd soon after and continue with the group as they were struggling to keep up.

I would recommend firstly, should they decide to improve upon this cd, to clean up the sound and invest in better sound production techniques, secondly to replace the Evangelical with the proper Luminous Mysteries and thirdly, to slow down the recitation of the prayers so that this can be used in a community or group prayer setting.

Otherwise, the usefulness of this disc is seriously limited and in fact, I'm not sure what to use this for except perhaps to help explain to another what the rosary is about but only if you leave out tracks 7-11(Evangelical Mysteries)when I see great potential for such an album to be much, much more useful. Perhaps a more meaty booklet rather than the current 1 folded page insert would also aid in its usefulness.

My recommendation is to give this one a miss and to wait for the upgrade which I hope is in the works.