WHY  FIFTEEN  MYSTERIES?

In that wonderful little book called The Secret of the Rosary by St. Louis De Montfort, we read in the "Sixth Rose — Mary's Psalter":

EVER SINCE Saint Dominic established the devotion to the Holy Rosary up until the time when Blessed Alan de la Roche re-established it in 1460, it has always been called the Psalter of Jesus and Mary.  This is because it has the same number of angelic salutations as there are in the Psalms in the Book of the Psalms of David [emphasis added].  Since simple and uneducated people are not able to say the Psalms of David the Rosary is held to be just as fruitful for them as David's Psalter is for others.

But the Rosary can be considered to be even more valuable than the latter for three reasons:

1.  Firstly, because the Angelic Psalter bears a nobler fruit, that of the Word Incarnate, whereas David's Psalter only prophesies His coming;

2.  Secondly, just as the real thing is more important than its prefiguration and as the body is more than its shadow, in the same way the Psalter of Our Lady is greater than David's Psalter which did no more than prefigure it;

3.  And thirdly, because Our Lady's Psalter (or the Rosary made up of the Our Father and Hail Mary) is the direct work of the Most Blessed Trinity and was not made through a human instrument.

Our Lady's Psalter or Rosary is divided up into three parts of five decades each, or the following special reasons [emphasis added]:

1.  To honor the three Persons of the Most Blessed Trinity;

2.  To honor the life, death and glory of Jesus Christ;

3.  To imitate the Church Triumphant, to help the members of the Church Militant and to lessen the pains of the Church Suffering;

4.  to imitate the three groups into which the Psalms are divided:

(a) the first being for the purgative life,

(b) the second for the illuminative life,

(c) and the third for the unitive life;

5.  And finally, to give us graces in abundance during our lifetime, peace at death, and glory in eternity.

With these considerations in mind, it does not seem proper to add another 5 decades / 50 Hail Mary's to Our Lady's Psalter (i.e. the "Luminous Mysteries").  It was Our Lady Herself who came from Heaven to give us the Rosary of 15 decades and 150 Hail Mary's to be a substitute for the Divine Office of 150 Psalms (as we have seen above).  Let us also recall that Our Blessed Mother asked through Sr. Lucy of Fatima that we, Her children, make the Five First Saturdays.  In this request, the Heavenly Prophetess — who surely knew the future and that one day a Pope would attempt to add five new decades — asked (among other things) that we keep Her "company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary."  She could have simply said, "while meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary," but She chose instead to specify the number "fifteen."

For these reasons, while there is certainly nothing intrinsically evil with honoring or meditatinsg on the new Luminious Mysteries, it does not seem right to consider them part of the Most Holy Rosary of 15 decades, Our Lady's Psalter, which St. Dominic received from Our Lady Herself.

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