My experience with the Rosary Congress is primarily one of observation. I’ve seen my mother and her friends plan, talk, and organize so that the people of God can worship our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament and venerate our Blessed Mother through the Rosary.

I’ve come to think of the Congress as a gathering of people enthusiastic to respond to the universal call to holiness. This proposition – that every member of the Mystical Body of Christ is called to respond to the actual and sanctifying grace that impels them to sanctity – is a seemingly paradoxical thing. Each of us are called to this holiness, but how we respond is particular. Our personalities, dispositions, experiences, cultures, family dynamics, and the rest all inform how we, through our intellect and will, acknowledge and receive the grace offered to us.

The late Benedict XVI wrote to Bishop Domenico Sigalini in 2012, saying that the Church’s lay faithful “should not be regarded as “collaborators” of the clergy, but, rather, as people who are really “co-responsible” for the Church’s being and acting.” And Paul VI before him, in 1965, exhorted the laity to “answer gladly, nobly, and promptly the more urgent invitation of Christ in this hour and the impulse of the Holy Spirit. … Ever productive as they should be in the work of the Lord, they know that their labor in Him is not in vain (cf. 1 Cor. 15:58).”

Those who step foot in a church, chapel, or shrine during a Rosary Congress, aware or not, respond to the grace of being present with Christ now present under a veil with the hope of one day seeing Him face to face. The gathering of the laity through the Rosary Congress seems to me an act of the heart than one of the mind. The laity of the Church instinctively see where our culture is and where its headed. Some in the Church are called to work on the front lines in political life: in government, advocacy groups, and other civic organizations. But those who do not share this calling still feel called to preserve what they once knew, or, in the case of those enjoying a local culture consonant with the teachings and spirit of the faith, to preserve what they now know.

So they pray: sometimes vocally, sometimes silently, but always communally. They take seriously what Christ told his disciples: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18:20).

Though my experience of the Rosary Congress in my hometown of Pittsburgh is more one of observation than organization or collaboration, what I have observed is my fellow lay faithful responding to graces they have individually received in the only way Christians know how: prayers of adoration, petition, intercession, and thanksgiving. May the movement of the Rosary Congress continue, remembering the words of the Psalmist: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.”