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"Make Them. Pray Them. Give Them Away."
An Interview with Rosary Army.com

by Bobbi

Interview done in 2004.

While searching the web, I came across a wonderful apostolate called Rosary Army.com. Greg and Jennifer Willits have made it their mission to spread devotion to the Rosary. Their motto? Make Them. Pray Them. Give Them Away.

RoL: Hi! Thank you for giving us the opportunity to get to know you all better and learn more about your apostolate. Who is involved with the Rosary Army?

Greg: Unofficially, there are many more than my wife and I. We're completely dependent on the help and generosity of other people. Some of our parents are involved and there's a group of folks from our own parish whose help we often enlist when we're going to other parishes to present workshops. Additionally we occasionally solicit advice and guidance from a couple priests we know. And, of course, when it comes to making Rosaries to give away to others, we couldn't do it without the help of people who visit our website and have started making, praying, and giving away all-twine knotted Rosaries.

Jennifer: Yes. I am largely responsible for managing the financial aspects of Rosary Army and give input when asked (and sometimes when not asked.)

RoL: It's obvious from your website that you all have a love of the rosary, but have you always felt this way? How was your faith growing up?

Jennifer: My love and appreciation for the rosary was not always there. It only developed less than a year ago. My faith as a child was Catholic but no rosary was ever introduced to me back then. My faith then took a turn into Protestantism because I had to follow my parents leading. As a young adult, my faith came to a halt and I was living only for myself. When I met my husband, Greg, my faith returned and with my husband's help, I was ultimately brought back into the Catholic Church. Before I prayed my first real rosary, I had to really educate myself about proper Marian devotion since my Protestant background conditioned me against it. Once I understood the Catholic Church's position on Our Lady and the Holy Rosary, I began praying it and am now saying it daily with my whole family.

Greg: My own faith in the Rosary is actually fairly new, despite the fact that I'm a cradle Catholic. My folks have always had a strong faith, and so have I, but until the past few years, I never really understood WHY I was Catholic. When I moved back to the south as an adult, I had a lot of non-Catholic acquaintances asking me very pointed and difficult questions about the faith for which I simply didn't have answers. Just two or three years ago I was a very devoted Christian, but because of all these questions, I actually contemplated leaving the Catholic Church. It was by digging into the early history of Christianity, by looking at what happened in the almost 400 years leading up to the Bible being combined into a single volume, by learning that there have been more than 20,000 different Protestant denominations yet one Catholic Church since the Protestant Reformation, that my faith in the Catholic Church was cemented. A devotion to the Rosary grew from there.

RoL: Was there are specific situation that really opened your eyes to the power of the rosary in your own life?

Greg: I started praying the Rosary - skeptically - on the advice of Fr. Michael Heninger, a good priest and good friend of ours. When I started praying it, I prayed to God first to forgive me in case praying to Mary was offensive to Him! The more I prayed it, being careful to learn how to meditate on the mysteries and not just repeat the prayers, I felt a genuine sense of ease and certainty that praying the Rosary was a good thing. The peace that came into my life from praying it was very reassuring.

Jennifer: I believe in the power of the Rosary. I have witnessed incredible situations that have turned around for the better for OTHER people on account of the Rosary. I know with every fiber in my being that there IS power in this holy prayer. For me, experiencing a powerful result is not a requirement. I'll pray it regardless.

RoL: How did Rosary Army.com come about?

Jennifer: It all started with my husband getting the spiritual tug to make all twine knotted rosaries just for fun. He soon became addicted to this craft and slowly started perfecting the overall look of it. He then started giving them away to people. This continued for months and the response from people was overwhelmingly positive.

Greg: For months, though, I couldn't get anyone else to try it, though Jennifer did make an attempt but initially gave up. Though he didn't have any interest in making them, my friend Ken and I had several conversations about trying to get clear, illustrated instructions online. He kept pushing the idea of giving away Rosaries online, too, but considering I was the only one making them I shot that idea down right away. It was all I could do to make enough to give to my friends, family, and people at Church.

After Ken and I worked on a retreat for teens in March of 2003, though, God completely opened the doors for Rosary Army. Before I was to give a talk to the teens about the Rosary, Ken and I talked about the fact that I started making Rosaries in September 2002 and the following month the pope declared it the Year of the Rosary. I pointed that out to Ken, who made the comment, "It kind of makes you wonder who else Mary got to start making Rosaries." When he said that, my first thought was, "Wow, I'm in an Army."

A few minutes later I presented the talk and the teens were completely receptive to it. I then taught the 50 or so teens and 10 plus adults in attendance how to make all-twine knotted Rosaries. By the end of the retreat, we decided to trust Mary to bring us enough Rosary makers to meet demand, and within a week RosaryArmy.com was online, offering a free Rosary to whoever requested one.

Jennifer: On Good Friday of this year, we officially filed for incorporation and Rosary Army became a legal non-profit organization. So instead of only giving rosaries away to local people, we were making plans to give rosaries to anyone around the world.

RoL: What is the purpose or goal of the Rosary Army?

Greg: The purpose of Rosary Army is to encourage people of all ages, especially those without a complete understanding of the Rosary, to grow closer to God by meditating on the life of Jesus Christ through the praying of the Rosary. As mentioned, we offer free instruction on making and praying Rosaries, provides limited Rosary-making supplies to others, and manages the distribution of donated Rosaries throughout the world via mail requests and religious conferences.

Jennifer: Our motto is: Make Them. Pray Them. Give Them Away.

RoL: What has the response been like?

Greg: The response has been very interesting, to say the least. I can't wait to learn of a genuine conversion story as a result of Rosary Army, but it hasn't happened yet (at least that we know of)! The most interesting stories are the ones where someone stumbled upon our website, saw our Rosary making instructions, and now gives away hundreds of Rosaries themselves. That's very satisfying.

We have learned of a few healings and answered prayers as a result of Rosaries and Divine Mercy chaplets being prayed using Rosaries provided by Rosary Army, and that, too, is very satisfying.

But more than anything, it's the people who have told us that they've started praying the Rosary as a result of what God has had us do that we feel like we're on the right path.

RoL: This is more of a practical question, but how do you fund all the rosaries you give away?

Greg: When I first started giving Rosaries away, I could only afford to buy a couple colors of twine at a time. Over the course of four or five months, I had a few people give me a few bucks here and there to buy more supplies. It was hard to accept donations from others, but I knew if did that I'd be able to give away even more Rosaries. Jennifer and I also started using tithe money to pay for supplies. We subscribe to giving at least 5% of our personal earnings to our parish, 1% to our archdiocese, and 4% to other charities. So we initially used some of that 4% to buy supplies. Once we started offering Rosaries for free on the Internet, the requests started pouring in. We continued to tithe our own money to Rosary Army, but now many people started sending in donations to help cover shipping and supply expenses. This also enabled us to offer more colors and put nice metal Crucifixes on every Rosary we give away. Basically, we've learned to simply trust Mary on this one.

Jennifer: The money comes from donations from the sheer generosity of others. So far, we have always had what we needed. Mary has provided for us quite well. Thank goodness, this is not an expensive operation. Even if no one ever sends us another dollar, we believe in this mission so much that we will personally help it out financially when need be for as long as we have to.

RoL: How would you respond to a person who thinks the rosary is a worthy prayer but they personally find it tedious or boring to pray?

Jennifer: The key is in the meditation of the mysteries. I would suggest trying to relate more powerfully to the segments of Jesus' life by imagining it was their own loved one being scourged and beaten, etc. I think if people find it boring, it's only because they lack the understanding of how to "connect" to the rosary. One of the best ways a person can connect to something is if they can relate to an experience on a more personal level. Once they put themselves "in the rosary" they can get a clue of what an inkling of the emotions had to have truly been like and then they can get a sense of the power of the passion of Jesus, etc.

Greg: Ah, this is one of my favorite topics, and is usually the basis for most of the talks I present to different church groups. In Pope John Paul's apostolic letter on the Rosary, he wrote, "The Rosary, precisely because it starts with Mary's own experience, is an exquisitely contemplative prayer. WITHOUT this contemplative dimension, it would lose it's meaning…Without contemplation, the Rosary is a body without a soul, and its recitation runs the risk of becoming a mechanical repetition of formulas, in violation of the admonition of Christ: "In praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words.""

If you just recite one prayer after the other without meditating on Jesus' life, then yes, it will be tedious and boring. But if a person stops, opens their Bible, reads the Scripture passages where the Rosary Mysteries come from, and then uses one's God-given imagination to truly bring the Mysteries to life like a motion picture in one's brain, then the Rosary takes on a whole new meaning. The purpose of praying the Rosary is to grow closer to Jesus by meditating, by contemplating, by trying to really picture the sights, sounds, smells, images, feelings, emotions, that really existed with each step Jesus took on this earth. When Jesus was being scourged at the pillar, what was that really like? Really try to picture that. Picture our savior tied to a pillar, stripped down to practically nothing, and picture how horribly mangled his back must have looked as the soldier's whips slashed deeply into his back.

I get quite impassioned about this topic, as people who have listened to the talks on our website can attest to!

RoL: You both as couples have families with young children. How do you balance your work in the apostolate with your first responsibilities as spouses and parents?

Greg: Mary definitely set the stage for Rosary Army to come into being, and we've had many conversations between our families on how miraculous it is that our lives have become so intertwined.

Not only did we co-found Rosary Army with the Dawson family, but we live across the street from each other, go to the same church together, and I even work for Ken's company as a software developer. Both Ken and I work from home, so my commute to work is about thirty seconds (or about 2 minutes if I get a cup of coffee first). The time I save from not having to commute is substantial in itself.

We also involve our children in the apostolate. Some of the Dawson kids make Rosaries, and we often utilize "Dawson Express" (i.e., the Dawson kids) to run things back and forth between our homes.

A lot of the work we do is with mailing Rosary requests and making website updates. I tend to do a lot of the web updates either early in the morning before my real job begins or at night after the kids go to bed. We're big sticklers on having routines in our house, so the kids are usually in bed by 8. I try to do web updates all at once, so I tend to wait until I have several changes that need to be made so I'm not working on the site site every single night.

Jennifer: Rosary Army requires very little time from me now. In the beginning, when RA was newly formed, we all were cranking out rosaries left and right to build up our inventory, which we desperately needed. The mail requests are now shared between us and it has not been an overwhelming task. We tried to create Rosary Army to be as low maintenance as possible because of our hectic family lives and we believe we have succeeded.

RoL: How has the rosary affected your family life?

Jennifer: Yes, it has brought our family closer together. And that's a very good thing.

Greg: How has the Rosary NOT affected my life! Since I really developed a devotion to the Rosary a couple years ago, everything has changed. I prayed a 54-day novena about my job situation and a few months later Ken offered me a job. I asked God to help me know if praying the Rosary was pleasing to Him, and all the doors were opened for us to create Rosary Army. Our children pray the Rosary and we now have nightly family prayer. We pray the Rosary with others more easily now. We all have grown closer to Jesus and His mother because we've learned the value of stopping to truly meditate on His life on a daily basis. The Rosary is completely embedded in every aspect of our family life.

RoL: Any last comments you'd like to make?

Greg: We try to update our website regularly, and invite all visitors to leave comments to help build our Rosary Army community. Even if you're not a Rosary maker, we're sure everyone who is just curious about the Rosary or those with a life-long devotion will find something of interest at www.RosaryArmy.com. And we're always open to hearing suggestions on how we can improve our apostolate and our website. Visitors are welcome to contact us at email@rosaryarmy.com.

RoL: Thanks so much for your time and sharing with us. We strongly believe in your work and are grateful for this opportunity to let others know about your much-needed apostolate! We pray that God will continue to bless you!

Jennifer: You are so welcome! It has been my pleasure to answer your questions and I hope my comments will be of benefit to someone. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.

Greg: And thanks to you two for all you do, as well. We really appreciate the opportunity to work together to spread our awesome Catholic faith.

Greg Willits is the Executive Director and co-founder of Rosary Army, a non-profit Catholic apostolate dedicated to making, praying, and giving away all-twine knotted Rosaries, and encouraging others to do the same. He and his wife Jennifer live in Conyers, GA with their children. To have Rosary Army visit your parish group to present a talk and conduct a Rosary making workshop, contact them at email@rosaryarmy.com.