The Rosary is among the best-known devotions of the Roman Catholic tradition. Using a string of beads to keep count, the one praying repeats sequences of the Lord's Prayer, the 'Hail Mary,' and the 'Glory Be,' while meditating in turn on a series of 'mysteries' — moments from the lives of Christ and his mother, grouped as Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, and (since 2002) Luminous.
The practice grew in the medieval West, where counting prayers on beads was a way for the unlettered to keep a rhythm of devotion paralleling the monks' recitation of the Psalter. Catholic tradition came to associate its spread especially with the Dominicans. Its heart is meditative: the repeated words form a quiet background against which the mind contemplates the gospel scenes.
The Rosary belongs distinctively to the Roman Catholic tradition. The Christian East has its own bead-counted prayer in the prayer rope and the Jesus Prayer, with a different content. Most Protestant traditions do not pray the Rosary, and some object to the Marian prayers it contains — a difference Theologos notes descriptively, leaving each tradition's reasons to be heard in its own voice rather than adjudicated here.