Celebrating 43 Years:
The Years Before the Beads
This is another
part of our Rosary Makers Ministry story that has not been told yet. This was
the very beginning, when I started in 1983, and the Holy Spirit entered my
heart, and from that moment on in my life, everything changed. This is what
happened in the beginning years after that experience, back when the only technology
I had was a stamp, a typewriter, and an incredible positive hope that the mail
would get there.
A
Teenager With a Mailing List
I finished
high school in 1983, the same year my whole faith caught fire. I won’t retell
that part, if you’ve read this blog for a while, you already know My Story.
What you don’t know is what I did with it.
I started
writing letters to dioceses. I reached out, asking about parishes, about anyone,
anywhere, who might be doing anything with the Rosary. And the response was
outstanding. The diocese sent me a list of every single church across the
boroughs of New York City, including addresses, phone numbers, the names of the
priests in their church, and how many families were registered at the church.
Keep in mind, I was on Staten Island, early 1980s, no internet, no search
engine, no way to find “anything or everything about who was praying or sharing
the Rosary” except by writing letters to church offices and waiting for responses
to come back. And they did, secretaries and priests and deacons wrote back. It
was, completely unexpectedly, phenomenal. My commitment to this amazing calling
to spread and share the Joy of the Rosary was solidified by this super
positive, authentic response.
One of those
correspondents was a man who had an enormous rosary garden planted across his
property, filled with roses and every mystery. We shared letters back and forth
for several years about our shared love for the Rosary, about what was
happening in this small, growing network of people who loved the same Rosary we
did. I don’t have all the details in front of me. I journaled through most of
those years, and somewhere in a box, that whole correspondence is still
sitting, waiting to be reread. One of these days, I’ll go digging. He was such
an inspiration and encouragement to me as I was developing what has become what
we are doing today with the Rosary Makers Ministry.
One
Already Home, Two Still on the Road
I didn’t know
it at the time, but in those years, I befriended three remarkable people of
faith, one already a canonized saint, and two still on the road toward that
same destination.
Through a good
friend, I was able to get hundreds upon hundreds of rosaries hand-delivered to
Mother Teresa in Calcutta. My friend, Jerry Kelly, spent time with her in
person; her response was a handwritten note to me that she gave Jerry to bring
back to me. I still can’t fully describe what it felt like to hold something
she had written. Today she’s Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Many of you know who she
is.
Around that
same time, I exchanged two letters with a priest named Father Patrick Peyton,
the man behind “The family that prays together stays together,” who’s
credited with preaching the Gospel in person to more people than any other
Catholic in history. His letters back to me were short, nothing lengthy, but
inspirational for me; he encouraged me to keep doing what I am doing. He didn’t
need to write pages, but he did respond, and that was amazing; a busy, famous
priest took the time to write back to a young, unknown man. I don’t remember
exactly how long I waited for that reply, only that it was the usual rhythm of
those years: mail it, and wait, and trust. Today, the Church has declared him
Venerable, one step from beatification, still walking that road.
And then there
was Mother Angelica. Sometime in the mid to late 1980s, as the rosary-making
side of things was taking shape, we started mailing fifty to a hundred rosaries
every single week to her at EWTN. Every week, for at least two years. At first,
she sent a handwritten thank-you card back every time, and then, I think once
she realized this wasn’t a one-time gift but something we were simply going to
keep doing, the cards slowed to about once a month. I still have a stack of
those cards, her actual handwriting, tucked away with everything else I saved
from that era. Her cause for canonization opened a few years ago. She’s a
Servant of God now, the very first step on the same road Father Peyton is
further along.
One was already a
Saint, two were on their way to be Saints, and at the time, none of us had any idea who they would turn out to be in our Catholic faith. All of it pointed back to
that same place: a hillside, known as the Cova in Portugal in 1917, where Our
Lady of Fatima asked, again and again, for one thing: to Pray The Rosary.
The
Rosary Chariot
Every car I’ve
owned since 1983 has had the same nickname: the Rosary Chariot. Doesn’t matter
the make, the model, the year, the moment I’m driving it, that’s what it
becomes, because it has one job beyond getting me from place to place: it
carries the Rosary wherever I go. Back then it meant a trunk with rosaries and
Bibles in it, headed to whatever parish or person I was trying to reach. It
still means exactly that today.
What’s
different today is the increase of how much more we are spreading the Joy of
The Rosary. Back then, we were just starting out, one contact at a time. I was
finding my way around letter responses, with weeks of silence in between. Today
we have a GPS, for the road, sure, but also for the ministry itself. We know
where we are going. We just didn’t always know that back then, and no matter
what, it didn’t stop me.
1989,
and What Grew From It
A few years
into that letter-writing season, the actual rosary-making began. That’s the
part of the story you’ve probably already heard. Beads of Joy Rosary Ministry started officially in 1989, even though I used that name sort of, since 1983.
What I don’t think gets said enough is that it didn’t start from nothing. It
started from years of finding people first, the slow way, the only way that
existed.
Today, our
ministry isn’t just me. It’s well over a hundred plus people, in multiple
locations through the US and Canada, making and giving away rosaries. Somewhere
around ninety-five percent of everything we produce goes out completely free,
no charge, no expectation, just given. We sell a small portion to help support
all the work we do, since we are 100% donation funded. We would love to have an
underwriter supporting us, but we don’t have that. Maybe the Lord will send us
one or more. I am one instrument among a hundred others and always know that it
is our Lord and our Lady who are doing the actual work. I just happened to be
the one writing letters to a diocese in 1983 with no idea where this would all
lead to.
Then
and Now
Here’s where
it almost gets funny to me. Back in the 80s and 90s, getting supplies meant
handwriting an order, mailing a check or a money order, and waiting two to
three weeks with absolutely no idea when, or if, anything would show up. There
was no tracking number. There was no “arriving Thursday between 2 and 6.” There
was just waiting and trusting the postal service the way you’d trust an old
friend who was occasionally late but never actually let you down.
Now I sit
down, order what I need online, and three days later it’s on my doorstep, and I
know exactly which carrier is bringing it and when. What used to take weeks of
uncertainty now takes a few clicks and a couple of days. The Rosary hasn’t
changed in over four hundred years. The means of getting the materials to make
it certainly have.
And the
network keeps growing the same way it always has, just faster now. On July 6th,
we’re heading back down to Chautauqua to our new Annex, to work with more
people to train joining the rosary makers there. And this very week, several boxes
are being packed and sent to Uganda, to Honduras, and to Guam, hundreds upon
hundreds of rosaries to each, headed to three different corners of the world,
the same prayer, the same simple request Our Lady made in 1917, still rippling
outward through ordinary people.
Wow.
Just Wow.
Something
happened to me over these last few months that’s never happened before, I
actually sat down and looked back. Forty-three years of this, and until this
deep dive into building blog after blog and digging through who I used to be, I
never really turned around and took it all in. I just kept going, fully focused,
keeping this Rosary Making machine running, starting New Annexes, training as
many people as I can, building solid friendships with our Rosary Makers and distributing
the Rosaries.
But here I am,
sitting at our kitchen table, looking back down the whole forty-three years of “highway”
behind me, and all I can say is wow. Wow, wow, wow. June 24th will be 43 years
since that 18-year-old me with a typewriter decided he wasn’t going to keep
this love for the Rosary to himself. And looking back at him now, it almost
feels like two different people. The teenager who started those letters and the
man writing this today, I know they’re the same person, but it sure doesn’t
always feel that way. That foundation feels like it belongs to somebody else’s
life.
Here’s a part
of the story I love telling, because it’s so beautiful in hindsight: years ago,
some kids at St. Patrick’s in Milford, Pennsylvania started calling me “Rosary
Man.” Just that, not “Jimmy,” not my last name, just Rosary Man. And without me
ever asking for it, that name gave me exactly what I’d always wanted without
knowing I wanted it: a way to stay in the background. I never set out to be the
face of our ministry. I just wanted to be the guy quietly keeping the machine
running in the back room, and a handful of kids at a parish in Pennsylvania
handed me the perfect disguise for that, completely by accident.
And it really is
a machine, in the most literal sense, for a good chunk of those years. Back
when my wife was alive, she and our five kids ran what I still think of as our
own little rosary factory, right out of our home, wrapping, packing, shipping,
the whole family working like a line of elves at Christmas, except this was
every week, year-round. That was roughly thirty years ago now. Today, the
operation is much bigger, way more advanced, and a product line, more than I
could’ve imagined back then, but the objective and focus haven’t moved an inch.
Same heart, same hard work. Just more hands doing it. Kenia and I are able to
manage and coordinate a lot more than I used to back then.
I’m not
surprised this has consumed my entire life; of course, it has. It’s been the one
constant since I was eighteen years old. But I am amazed, looking at it laid
out start to finish like this. I have always made rosaries since 1989, and I
have always shared the Rosary since 1983. There’ve been hard seasons in there,
plenty of them, but the thread never broke, not once. And I’ll be honest, I plan
on doing this until my very last breath. None of my own selfish desires has
ever mattered to me in all of this, my own time and money needed, none of it,
it’s all for our Lord and our Lady and sharing and spreading the Joy of the
Rosary. It’s the Lord’s work, and I’m just glad to still be standing here,
forty-three years in, looking back at the road and grinning.
The
Request Hasn’t Changed
That’s really
the whole story, when you boil it down. Our Lady asked for one thing at Fatima,
and she’s never stopped asking. In 1983, a teenager “me” answered with a
typewriter and a list of parishes. In 2026, a hundred-plus people answered with
their hands, making rosaries with love. Because of that, we support many
ministries, churches, and hospitals with hundreds upon hundreds of rosaries
regularly. The tools haven’t really changed, but the technology has. But the
request never did. And we will fulfill them.
I’m not telling you this because I did anything special. I didn’t. I just kept writing, kept driving the Rosary Chariot, kept saying yes to the next letter, the next person, the next box headed somewhere I’ll probably never visit. Somewhere in my house, there’s still a binder full of saints’ handwriting, Mother Angelica’s cards, whatever’s left of those old letters, waiting for me to finally open it back up and share it properly. If there’s a lesson buried in any of this, it’s that Our Lady doesn’t need anyone extraordinary to answer her request, just someone willing to keep showing up, one envelope, one bead, one ordinary day at a time. Thank you for reading this, and God bless you.
Rosary Man Jim, AKA James Dacey Jr., OFS
Communications Director
National Shrine Basilica of
Our Lady of Fatima
