Rosary guild blossoms at Most Holy Trinity Parish, Covington
Thursday, 17 November 2011 14:17 | 
Written by Peter Finney Jr. | 
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Every Wednesday after the morning Mass at Most Holy Trinity Church in Covington, eight to 10 parishioners gather in a meeting room to wrap Jesus and Mary around their little fingers.
Actually, it’s their index fingers, but the process of hand-weaving intricate rosaries out of spools of No. 36 fishing twine is an occasion of both prayer and fellowship, said Jane Maniscalco, the parish bookkeeper who started the rosary guild at Most Holy Trinity about a year ago to provide rosaries for those in hospitals and in the military.
“I have such a devotion and love for Mary,” said Maniscalco, a former military wife and mother who was first taught the art of rosary-making in the late 1990s when her husband Stephen was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport. “Mary has been my stronghold. It’s been wonderful over the years, praying the rosary and making rosaries and giving them to others, hoping that it inspires them to pray the rosary and lead them to God.”
Nimble fingers important
The craft is not difficult tolearn, but it does require patience and “nimble” if not small fingers, Maniscalo said. She first learned from a parishioner at St. Joseph Parish in Shreveport how to wrap the silk-like cord around her finger three times and then rotate the material just enough to form a perfectly shaped and spaced Hail Mary.
“She taught me because she needed helpers to teach the eighth-graders at St. Joseph School,” Maniscalco said. “Every year, she would go into the school and teach the children. Then they would donate the rosaries to parishioners.”
When their family moved to Japan in 2001, Maniscalco felt confident enough in her abilities to start a rosary guild at Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa. Over the next four years, the guild made thousands of rosaries for the military personnel who were deploying into combat areas.
Soft material keeps it quiet
It was important to use the soft material for the military rosaries.
“Otherwise they could clink and make noise,” Maniscalco said. “The purpose was to have something that was quiet and pliable and easy for military personnel to have in their pocket or anywhere else and not make noise. Everybody seemed to enjoy it so much that when I moved (to New Jersey in 2005), I thought it would be a wonderful ministry. It’s quite enjoyable to make them. It’s therapeutic.”
The Maniscalcos lived at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey from 2005-08, and the rosary guild there took off. The guild invited a group from Florida called the Rosary Army (rosaryarmy.com), and they traveled to New Jersey to teach more than 50 people how to make the rosaries.
“We were able to make the rosary, pray it and then give it away,” Maniscalco said.
After her husband retired from the Air Force in 2008, the Maniscalcos moved to the northshore, and she began working as a bookkeeper at Most Holy Trinity about 18 months ago and then placed an announcement in the bulletin about a year ago to start a rosary guild.
In the last 10 months, the guild has made more than 1,200 rosaries and has distributed them to hospital ministries and to Catholics in tornado-ravaged Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Joplin, Mo. The guild has received touching thank-you letters from those who received the rosaries.
A giving spirit
Parishioner Bell Valley has made thousands of rosaries on her own in the last 25 years – she learned how to make them during a retreat at the Center of Jesus the Lord – and she gives virtually all of them away.
“When I travel I’m always making one, and there’s always someone who sees me and asks me what I’m doing,” Valley said. “I end up giving them one, because they’ve never seen it before.”
Valley said what used to take her about 40 minutes to make now takes about 15 minutes. She keeps a cigarette lighter at hand to melt the end of the twine when the cross is finished.
An acquired skill
Last month, Valley sat next to Gerri Alonzo, coaching her how to make her first bead.
“I’m brand new, and this is really hard,” Alonzo said. “It’s hard to get it off my finger with the three loops. It looks easy, but they’re all supposed to be the same size.”
Then, she pulled through a perfect loop. “I think I did it,” Alonzo said.
“Eureka!” Valley said.
Mary DiCarlo doesn’t make rosaries, but she joined the ladies because her late husband Charles used to teach a rosary-making class at the People Program. She donated his tools to the group, which help when someone’s fingers just can’t do the job.
“He always had a big heart, and he always wanted to serve anybody that he could,” DiCarlo said of her husband. “This was one of his ways of being of service.”
What would he think of the Most Holy Trinity guild?
“He’s be right in there doing it with them,” DiCarlo said.
The group also has branched out from rosary making to crocheting prayer shawls for those who are undergoing surgery or chemotherapy or for those who just need a special request or prayer.
“I do this at night, and I crochet for hours on end,” said Pat Brady. “I love doing things like that.”
Maniscalco credits her mother for teaching her respect for the rosary, and she hopes the devotion can continue to expand.
“I was having trouble sleeping, and my mother would say, ‘Go pray the rosary,’ but I didn’t have a rosary to pray,” she said. “I would pray the Hail Mary and that would soothe me. Ever since I was a child, I always felt I was heard and Mary was helping me through troubled times.”
Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org .
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