Abstract
In the opinion of early commentators like Thurston (1900a), saying the was for centuries the single most popular of all the popular devotions in the Roman Catholic world. Even as recently as the 1970's, a survey conducted among a national sample of U.S. Catholics found that 36% of those surveyed had prayed the rosary in the preceding 30 days. At least until recently, it was a fairly common practice for rosary beads to be entwined around the fingers of Catholic corpses lying in state. Then too, terms like beadsnappers and bead-clackers have long been used as terns of derision for Catholics, at least in the United States, thus indicating that non-Catholics have also recognized (however unintentionally) the importance of the rosary to Catholics. Yet despite the fact that praying the has been an important part of folk Catholicism for centuries, I have been unable to locate any attempt by a social scientist to explain the underlying appeal of this devotion. Providing one such explanation is my goal here.
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