Thirty-year tradition continues at St. Anthony, Norton
If it’s been a while since you’ve prayed the rosary, members of St. Anthony in the far southwest city of Norton have you covered.
During October, several of them met each night at the church to hold treasured rosaries and recite the prayers that recount the lives of Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
“We celebrate rosary month in October, but most of us do the rosary every day, once or twice a day,” said Ken Slater as he gathered with about 25 other people on a late Friday afternoon, the trees just starting to turn color on the hills overlooking the church. “Every time I do the rosary, I feel blessed and protected.”
Like other parishioners who have been taking part in a St. Anthony tradition that began about 30 years ago, Ken is a native of the Philippines, where devotion to Mary is handed down from generation to generation. Living with an uncle when he was about 12, his friends at school helped him develop his prayer life.
“I see them praying all the time, in the hallway,” he said. “I still remember the name of one girl, Lourdes, with other kids saying, ‘C’mon, ‘c’mon, join us.’ ‘No, later, later,’ I said because I was shy at that time. But eventually I was able to join them, and they taught me how to pray and do the rosary.”
“I remember my grandmother when I stayed with her, 3 o’clock in the morning she walks around praying the rosary,” said Jane Slater, Ken’s wife. “I think it’s our tradition to be prayerful.”
Both are doctors; they met in medical school in the Philippines.
“When I was new here, I was surprised myself,” Ken said. “Where did all these Filipinos come from?”
Many of them are in the health professions, recruited to come to southwest Virginia to work in the under-served communities of Appalachia.
Like her fellow rosarians, retired physician Amor Barongan said the rosary is a constant part of her life — day and night.
“When I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m looking for my rosary,” she said. “First, I pray to the Holy Spirit, and then after that I pray the rosary, and the next thing you know, I’m back to sleep. The rosary is so powerful.”
Virginia Bulaclac said she and Barongan say the rosary every day without fail, whether home or out of town. And they say it online every day.
“With my sisters from Australia and Canada and the Philippines we do the online rosary since the start of the pandemic in March of last year,” Bulaclac said. “Every day at 7 a.m. we have to wake up to pray the rosary.”
More people filtered into the fellowship hall, including the people in charge of the evening’s potluck supper. Group members took turns hosting the meal during October, often choosing an important day in their life.
Dolly Palabrica picked her brother’s birthday. An office manager for a local company, Palabrica came to Norton a couple of years ago to get married.
“I gained all these second moms and dads,” she said, “and I don’t even feel homesick because it’s the same traditions here: going to church, the rosary. It’s just like back home. Even as early as grade school, grade one, I prayed the rosary. And my mom always prayed the rosary. She’s really the one that led all of us.”
The group decided to have a living rosary this night, using one with beads the size of baseballs. Retired coal miner Anthony Willis said it was made by the Baptist brother-in-law of a late parishioner about 20 years ago.
“Each person will hold three beads and say either the Hail Mary or the Our Father, and it goes all the way around,” he said. “It’s a moving rosary.”
While the meat and vegetable stew, rice and other dishes keep warm, the adults and children present grasp a section of the large rosary, form an oval and take turns reciting the familiar prayers “honoring Mama Mary,” as Bulaclac likes to say.
Since it’s Friday, they use the Sorrowful Mysteries.
“It’s one of the ways to the heart of Jesus,” said Barongan. “If you analyze all of those rosary mysteries it tells the whole story… passion, death, resurrection, joyful, sorrowful.”
They close with a hymn to Our Lady of Fatima.
Father Eric Baffour Asamoah, parochial administrator for the Holy Trinity parish cluster that includes St. Anthony, said the rosarians provide “a wonderful experience.”
The group wasn’t able to do this last October because of pandemic restrictions, but he said the diocese did permit them to say the rosary after Sunday Mass last year — “a spiritual activity they did with all seriousness.”
Anthony Willis’ wife, Beverly, would like more people from the parish to join them.
“You have to make it part of your day,” she said. “It’s only 15- 20 minutes, whether you say it in the morning, any time of day or at night.”
Some of the St. Anthony rosarians point out that the rosary can be great way to spread the faith.
“I was working in one of the hospitals here,” said Jane Slater. “And there was a nurse who had fallen away from being a Catholic and she had forgotten how to pray the rosary, so I got the pamphlet and gave her a rosary.”
Evangelization also took place the following day. Several parishioners gathered on a sidewalk in downtown Norton at noon for this year’s Public Square Rosary Crusade, one of hundreds of similar rallies across the country to commemorate the final appearance of Our Lady of Fatima, and to encourage anyone who hasn’t done it in a while to take out a rosary and spend a few minutes with the Blessed Mother.