HADDONFIELD – Those visiting the home of Bernadette and Tony Brennan over the summer may have noticed a few hangers, well, hanging around.
But it wasn’t shirts, skirts or pants dangling from those triangles. It was rosaries. Dozens and dozens of rosaries.
“These guys are all going to heaven, and they’ll probably be in penthouses,” Tony Brennan said, with a laugh and a smile, of his wife and about two dozen others who crafted 1,075 rosaries for the Beatification Mass of Archbishop Fulton Sheen.
“I was like a motor,” Bernadette Brennan said of working on the homemade rosaries, which needed to hang dry since they were crafted with glue and nail polish. “My reason for doing all of these rosaries was for the millions of people in the world who are suffering today for one reason or another.”
In the months before the Beatification Mass, Dolores Mozzillo, director of religious education at Christ the King Parish, heard that the Pontifical Mission Societies was running a campaign to collect 75,000 rosaries for the Sept. 24 celebration. She decided to take the project to the parish’s Rosary Ministry.
“‘How about 1,000?’” she recalled suggesting during the group’s June meeting.
The 10 members of the Rosary Ministry picked up the challenge, but that number of volunteers more than doubled as people heard of the project. Fast-forward to Sept. 10, which is when the ministry’s members packed boxes with 1,075 World Mission Rosaries to be mailed to the Midwest and blessed and utilized at the Mass for Blessed Sheen in St. Louis.
The design of the rosaries, created by Archbishop Sheen for missionary work, uses five colors to represent different continents and missionary territories. The group ordered beads and supplies from Our Lady’s Rosary Makers in Kentucky, then adapted their usual process to include the rosaries’ center medals.
For Dr. Louise DelNegro, making the rosaries brought back memories of her years caring for Native American patients, including members of the Cocopah and Quechuan communities, on reservations in Arizona and California. “It made me feel like I was back there, praying for those people who are poor, grieving or sick.”
As the number of completed rosaries climbed, Mozzillo tracked the effort with an image of a thermometer printed in the parish bulletin. What began as an ambitious pledge became a shared project, with participants encouraging one another and evangelizing – even across state lines.
Mozzillo, for example, made rosaries while camping in Maryland. Curious campers stopped by to see what all the beading was about. Some pitched in to help, others asked her to explain more about Archbishop Sheen.
“There were all ages, 12 to upper 80s,” she said. “Catholic, non-Catholic, knowledge of Fulton Sheen, no knowledge of Fulton Sheen. It was a really blessed experience.”
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