Go here to download a free, 6-page, PDF booklet with complete instructions.

The time stamp on his post indicates that Mr. Esguerra published this item more than five years ago, on April 30, 2003. Somehow it escaped my notice until this morning. Oh well. Better late than never!

Creating ChanttheRosary.com has proved an eventful journey. Sadly, one of the events that happened along the way was my mother’s death.

Mama died of complications of congestive heart failure, in the wee hours of the morning of Wednesday, September 26, 2007. She died at home, with my sister Linda at her side. It happened around 2:30 am, Linda says.

Top three rows: my mother and father in happier days. Below left: Mama’s high school graduation portrait. Below right: Mama in recent years.

I could not write about this when it happened. A year later, words still fail me. Someday, perhaps, when I have more distance from this matter, I will write something more on it. For now, I can only pray.

My mother’s name was Lillian. I loved her with all my heart and soul. May God have mercy on her. May she rest in peace.

Enter the word “Credo” in the search engine for the I-Tunes Store. As of this writing (October 9, 2008), the search yields 150 results, only seven of which are Latin Gregorian chants. All seven of these Gregorian chants are versions of the Nicene Creed, not the Apostles’ Creed. The remaining 143 songs are a hodge-podge of pop tunes, Mexican rancheras and classical renditions of the Nicene Creed by Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Beethoven and others of that era. Even among these classical composers, every “Credo” proved to be a version of the Nicene Creed, not the Apostles’ Creed.

The popularity of the Nicene Creed is understandable. It has been an integral part of the Mass for at least a thousand years. By contrast, the Apostles’ Creed rarely turns up in any liturgy. Even so, I find it hard to understand the neglect which the Apostles’ Creed has suffered, for so many centuries, from the masters of Gregorian chant.



A rare 14th-century chant of the Apostles’ Creed appears on the album Codex Sanblasianus, performed by the Hungarian choir Schola Cantorum Budapestiensis.


The Codex Sanblasianus

A bare month before the scheduled launch date for ChanttheRosary.com — on September 8, 2008, that is — I thought I had found my Holy Grail. It appeared that I had stumbled upon an authentic, medieval version of the Credo in Deum, set to Gregorian chant.

The chant appeared on the CD album Codex Sanblasianus: Medieval Mass for the Feast of Annuntiation, performed by the Hungarian choir Schola Cantorum Budapestiensis.

Conductor János Mezei evidently found this gem in an obscure 14th-century South German manuscript housed in the British Museum. (1)

Polyphonous Albion

Alas, no sooner had I acquired Codex Sanblasianus, than I realized the Credo in Deum it featured might not fit the bill. It was beautiful, but was it Gregorian? Unlike the other chants on the album, the Credo was polyphonous, sung in what sounded like two-part harmony. Here it is:

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]
Credo in Deum, from Codex Sanblasianus
by Schola Cantorum Budapestiensis

Beautiful as it was, the song confounded my untrained ear. Where exactly did the melody end and the other parts begin? How could I sing such a complex composition solo? And if I could not sing it solo, of what use would it be in chanting the Holy Rosary?

Despite these doubts, I had no choice but to record a solo version of the song. Without the Credo in Deum from the Codex Sanblasianus, I would have no Credo in Deum at all. And a chanted Rosary must have a Credo in Deum! So, for better or worse, here is what I concocted:

Friends of mine with expertise in liturgical chant fortunately dissuaded me from including the above video in my tutorial. One of these, my good friend David Yeagley, observed that, since the stated goal of my tutorial was to teach people to sing the Rosary in authentic Gregorian chant, it made little sense to teach a polyphonous chant, since polyphony, by definition, is not Gregorian.

A “Farsed” Apostles’ Creed

This verdict could have left me with a gaping hole in my tutorial. However, I had, in the meantime, stumbled upon yet another version of the Apostles’ Creed, this one authentically Gregorian beyond any doubt.

The Credo in Deum I ended up using in this tutorial is “farsed“, which is to say that it was set to music originally written for a different prayer. Mind you, I am not the one who performed this switcheroo. It was done long ago, sometime in the late 12th Century, probably because some church needed a Credo in Deum to celebrate some special feast day, but could not find any music written especially for that prayer. So the church did the next best thing; it stripped out the words from some other song, composed for some other prayer, and stripped in the words of the Credo.

All of this may sound a bit dodgy, but the point is that the farsing was done during the Middle Ages, by actual medieval people, and that makes it authentic. Not only was this farsed version of the Credo in Deum actually sung at some 12th-Century medieval mass, but the musical score of the farsed Credo somehow managed to survive the centuries, ending up on pages 235-36 of David Hiley’s Western Plainchant: A Handbook. Professor Hiley explains on page 168:

“Three different Credo texts were known in the Middle Ages. The Apostles’ Creed (’Credo in Deum patrem omnipotentem creatorem caeli et terrae’) was often said as part of preparatory prayers before the services of the office. The only known musical settings are farsed ones from special festal liturgies (see Ex. II.23.19 below). Curiously, however, among the Greek ordinary-of-mass chants which are notated in a number of earlier sources (see VIII.2.v) is a Greek creed, and this is the Apostles’ Creed. No source with diastematic notation is known. [...].”

What all of this means in plain English is that the Credo in Deum which now appears on this tutorial is probably the best version available which is clearly, unambiguously and undeniably Gregorian, and was actually performed during the Middle Ages. I hope you enjoy it!

1. Die Handschrift London, British Museum, Add. 27630 (LoD). Hrsg. von Wolfgang
Dömling. 1972. 2v. (Bärenreiter- Verlag)

Monks of the Eastern churches have long prayed the Jesus Prayer, which they repeat over and over, often hundreds of times at a stretch, keeping track of their repetitions on a knotted prayer rope which the Greeks call the Komboskini.

The Jesus Prayer is based upon the prayer of the humble tax collector related in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican in Luke 18. The Publican beat his breast and cried out in the Temple, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner“.

The Publican’s outcry inspired the Jesus Prayer, which says: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” In practice, the prayer is often abbreviated to such compact forms as, “Lord have mercy!” (Kyrie eleison, in Greek).


St. Dominic’s “Second Way of Prayer”

With these facts in mind, consider the famous account of St. Dominic’s “Nine Ways of Prayer” written by an anonymous Bolognese author between 1260 and 1288. Citing well-known disciples of St. Dominic, such as Sister Cecilia of St. Agnes at Bologna, the anonymous author describes the good Saint’s “Second Way of Prayer” in these words:

“Saint Dominic used to pray by throwing himself outstretched upon the ground, lying on his face. He would feel great remorse in his heart and call to mind those words of the Gospel, saying sometimes in a voice loud enough to be heard: “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” [Luke 18:13]

That is the Jesus Prayer, without a doubt. Did Dominic discover it independently? Or was it taught to him?


Time to Hit the Books

Being a newcomer to this subject, I will have to read many books about St. Dominic before presuming to dispute the findings of, say, the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Still, I wince whenever some scholar, Catholic or otherwise, confidently denies the existence of any evidence connecting St. Dominic to the Rosary prior to the writings of Blessed Alanus de Rupe, published some 250 years later. “Perhaps Alanus thought it necessary to create an `author’ for an authorless practice”, muses Anne Winston-Allen in Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages, page 72).

Perhaps he did. Then again, perhaps not.

Given the fact that scholars have allowed more than seven centuries to pass since the publication of the “Nine Ways of Prayer” without producing a single treatise attempting to explain St. Dominic’s obvious and provocative use of the Eastern Orthodox Jesus Prayer, I am forced to wonder just how carefully and thoroughly scholars have been studying any of the facts concerning this man, and how much they really know about St. Dominic.

Dear reader, I blush to think how very few people must know or care that ChanttheRosary was launched before, not once, but twice.

This tutorial first appeared as a lengthy post on my Poe.com blog, published July 7, 2007 — that’s right, 7/7/7, the same day that Pope Benedict XVI issued his Motu Proprio on restoring the Latin Mass.

Subsequently, on August 28, 2007, I re-launched the tutorial on its own Web site, ChanttheRosary.com. The site unfortunately developed more problems than I had time to address, so I was forced to abandon it for many months, casting it adrift like a derelict ship.

I hope my readers will agree that the present site marks a great improvement over the old one.

The launch date could hardly be more auspicious. Today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, in the Year of our Lord 2008. Legend holds that Our Lady appeared to St. Dominic in the church of Notre Dame de Prouille 800 years ago, in A.D. 1208. There, it is said, the Blessed Mother imparted to St. Dominic the secrets of the Holy Rosary.

Here at ChanttheRosary.com, we don’t have many secrets to impart, but we do offer a wealth of information concerning a long-neglected subject — how to sing the Rosary in Latin, in the authentic melodies of Gregorian chant.

Welcome, dear readers, to the new, improved ChanttheRosary.com. I hope you find it useful.