Catholics Rally Sunday for UK ‘Rosary on the Coast’

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LONDON (ChurchMilitant.com) - Across the United Kingdom, Catholics are preparing for a pilgrimage to their nation's shores.

On Sunday, tens of thousands of U.K. Catholics — including nine bishops — will assemble at more than 300 sites in England, Scotland and Wales to pray for "a re-flourishing of faith across the British Isles."

The Rosary on the Coast is described as the country's most significant Catholic event in years; Pope Francis has given his Apostolic Blessing to all who attend.

Organizer Antonia Moffat has described the response as proof the campaign has "touched something in people's hearts."

The roots of the British initiative spring from Polish and Irish soil. In October 2017, more than 1 million Catholics gathered along Poland's borders to beg Our Lady's intercession for their country and for the world.

Their display of faith inspired a similar effort in Ireland where, just seven weeks later, 30,000 faithful assembled on the shores of their island to pray the Rosary for the preservation of the Faith and for the defense of the right to life.

According to Rosary on the Coast's website, Catholics in Poland and Ireland "responded to what they sense as a movement of the Holy Spirit to gather around the coasts of their nations and pray to Jesus, the Divine Mercy, for a renewal of faith and respect for human life through the powerful intercession of Our Lady of the Rosary."

"Having witnessed this," it says, "a number of the lay faithful in the British Isles — England, Scotland, Wales and their isles — have felt the same inspiration and urge to respond."

Organizers described the Rosary on the Coast as "a call to prayer in intercession for peace, for the conversion of our isles and for a re-flourishing of our Faith, so that God's Commandments can be honored and upheld and that all human life can be respected from conception to natural death."

"Jesus taught His disciples that some evils can be cast out only by prayer and fasting. Today's evils are no different, " the organizers asserted.

Supporters say Sunday's event "can provide a privileged moment for moving and gathering the faithful throughout the Church in England, Wales and Scotland to such means of ridding ourselves of the present threats to faith, the dignity of the human person and to peace."

Across the world, faithful Catholics took note that the rallies in Poland and Ireland came during the centenary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal.

For Britons, the year held added significance: "In our country," organizers say, "2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Abortion Act, which came into effect on 27 April 1968 and which has overseen the killing of nearly 9 million unborn children."

Britain, they note, has been identified as "the geopolitical epicenter of the Culture of Death" in our times — a designation reinforced by recent events in Liverpool, where doctors and judges have been pushing to euthanize twenty-three month-old toddler Alfie Evans, a baptized Catholic.

Those spearheading the event acknowledge Britain's faithful are deeply troubled by "the unchecked moral decline of our society."

At the same time, they say, there is hope, as the magnifying moral crisis is arousing "a new urgency to find some higher, more supernatural response, one that will adequately engage and overcome the dark strongholds of our world."

Drawing from the Sacred Scriptures, they note, " The books of Joshua and Daniel help us understand the spiritual context of what we are about and offer us some lessons in the shape of a faith-filled response."

"God's people," organizers say, "are to pray to Him to bring down the strongholds of evil that the walls of hatred of sin and division, of disunity in families, communities and among nations might come tumbling down."

They remind Catholics of God's promise in 2 Chronicles 7:14: "If my people who bear my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my presence and turn from their wicked ways, I myself will hear from heaven and forgive their sins and restore their land."

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