‘Rosary in a Year’ hits #1 in Apple podcasts this new year, outdoing Joe Rogan

(LifeSiteNews) — The “Rosary in a Year” podcast by Ascension Press topped Apple’s charts for the first three days of the new year, outranking top shows like the Joe Rogan Experience, indicating a remarkable surge of interest in Catholic spirituality.

Now sitting at #2 in Apple podcasts, ahead of The Mel Robbins podcast and Crime Junkie, the show is designed to teach people to encounter and connect with God in the prayer of the Rosary and includes catechesis as well as guided prayer. 

Its popularity is especially interesting during a time when the religiously unaffiliated are the largest cohort in the U.S. and behavior data claims that less than 10 percent of Americans attend religious services weekly. For American Catholics, that number is estimated to be two percent.

Fr. Mark-Mary Ames of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (CFR), who leads the podcast and features prominently on the Catholic media apostolate Ascension Presents, told Fox News Digital the Rosary is “the great remedy for our time.” There are countless testimonies of how the Rosary has changed people’s lives dramatically. In the comments section of Fr. Ames’ podcast introduction video alone, viewers write: “The Rosary saved my life”; “The Rosary has been saving me from my addictions to drugs and pornography;” “Praying the Rosary saved me from addiction.”

“It took hundreds of years to be developed to get to what it is, as a perfect prayer that has our way of receiving and coming to God,” said Fr. Ames. He stressed in the video introducing the podcast for the new year that its ultimate goal is to help people “fall in love with our Lord, Who loves us; To fall in love with Our Lady, Who loves us; And to fall in love with the Rosary,” which he described as a “privileged place of entering into relationship with Jesus, the most Holy Trinity, and Our Lady.”

He pointed out to Fox News that the Rosary is also “really good for our humanity” in a day and age when people have more difficulty focusing than ever before.

“We’re all over the place. It’s really hard for us to focus and to concentrate and the human ability to focus in the concrete for an extended period of time is… the foundation on which prayer is built,” said the priest. “It’s going to be really hard to hear God, to come to God, if you can’t pay attention at all. And so I think there’s a part of praying the Rosary, which is like physical therapy for the soul. The content works the concentration muscle within. It’s really atrophied.”

He admitted that he himself can get distracted while praying the Rosary — a normal experience that even the saints struggled with.

In his introductory video shared to YouTube, after reviewing three root causes of difficulty in praying the Rosary, Fr. Ames explained that the “Rosary in a Year” podcast will dive into the meaning of the foundational prayers of the Rosary – the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be – as well the mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ and the Blessed Mother, which are meditated upon during the Rosary, separated into the categories of the Glorious Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Joyful Mysteries of Christ. Pope John Paul II added five Luminous Mysteries in 2002. 

After the catechesis portion of the podcast, Fr. Ames will guide listeners in praying the Rosary, starting with a few of its beginning prayers and gradually building up to the five-decade Rosary.

Fr. Ames highlighted the fact that the Blessed Mother of God is the instrument through which God works in procuring grace in the Rosary, which consists of praying fives “decades” of 10 Hail Marys separated by five Our Fathers and five Glory Bes. The Catholic Church teaches that the Rosary was given by the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, to St. Dominic in 1214 during an apparition.  

The Church points to James 5:16 (“Pray one for another that you may be saved”) and to the example of Mary successfully asking Jesus to perform a miracle at the wedding feast in Cana (John 2:1-11) as proof of Her intercessory power with Christ.

“There’s something particular that God wants to do through Mary that also continues now. So, it’s interesting that even Mary’s the One Who continues to come,” he said. “I think the number one thing is [that] there seems to be some sort of special grace given by God to the Rosary where He wants to do some special work. And the Rosary is the thing that unlocks it. It opens the door to grace.”

Many miracles have been attributed to Rosary. The Church has long affirmed that the naval victory that Catholic nations had during the Battle of Lepanto in 1517 against its Muslim opponent was a result of fervent praying of the Rosary.  

Countless Catholics also attest that their illnesses have been cured and that family members who fell away from the faith or who prayed the Rosary during their life were helped by Our Lady in times of great need, especially during the end of their lives.