Scholarly fashion nowadays demands extreme skepticism toward any tradition claiming that St. Dominic promoted the Rosary, prayed the Rosary or frankly had anything at all to do with the Rosary. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that such skepticism is justified, what are we to make of the very strong evidence that St. Dominic habitually prayed the Jesus Prayer — a repetitive formula often viewed as the Eastern Orthodox version of the Rosary?

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.