How time flies.

It was five years ago next month that Pope John Paul added the Luminous Mysteries, or Mysteries of Light, to one of the Church’s most enduring devotions, the rosary. And Our Sunday Visitor has taken note of this:

Baptism in the Jordan. Wedding at Cana. Proclamation of the kingdom. Transfiguration. Institution of the Eucharist. Pope John Paul II brought these major events in Jesus’ life to the beloved Rosary, and catechized millions of Catholics at the same time.

In October 2002 — five years ago — he published his apostolic letter “Rosarium Virginis Mariae” (“On the Most Holy Rosary”) and launched a Year of the Rosary for Catholics around the world to pay special notice to this important devotion.

With this document, Pope John Paul, like many popes before him, proposed the Rosary as a rich source of spiritual nourishment and prayer. “With the Rosary,” he wrote, “the Christian people sit at the school of Mary and are led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depths of his love.”

But he also added his own personal stamp on how the Rosary is prayed in a way his predecessors never did. Set in a pontificate loaded with important teaching documents, “Rosarium Virginis Mariae” remains among the most dramatic, most personal and most accessible of them all.

“This letter is one of the most accessible things that he wrote. It’s a wonderful introduction to the Rosary,” said Amy Welborn, co-author of Praying the Rosary (OSV, $6.95). “It situates the Rosary within the whole spiritual life in a very helpful way.”

To sense that this apostolic letter was a personal matter for the pope, one need look no further than its date of publication: Oct. 16, 2002, the 24th anniversary of his election to the papacy.

He chose to make the letter public on this day, despite that just a few days earlier, on Oct. 6, the church celebrated the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary — a seemingly perfect day for such an event.

“How many graces have I received in these years from the blessed virgin through the Rosary,” Pope John Paul wrote. Of course, his devotion to Mary was widely known and an intense personal matter. When ordained an auxiliary bishop of Krakow, Poland, in 1958, he took the motto “Totus Tuus” (“totally yours”) — words taken from a prayer to Mary penned by St. Louis de Montfort. He also strayed from episcopal tradition and included the letter M, for Mary, in his coat of arms.

In addition to writing about the rich meaning of this prayer, Pope John Paul proposed the addition of five new mysteries to the 15 that already had made up the traditional Rosary for many centuries.

For generations, Christians prayed the Joyful Mysteries, which highlight events from the early life of Christ; the Sorrowful Mysteries, which highlight the suffering he endured at the end of his life; and the Glorious Mysteries, which focus on the heavenly glory of the Lord and his mother.

To these, the pope added the Luminous Mysteries (sometimes called the Mysteries of Light), five significant events from the public ministry of Jesus as it is presented in the gospels.

In this way, Pope John Paul filled the significant and centuries-old “gap” in the Rosary between the beginning and the end of Jesus’ life on earth.

“The addition of these new mysteries,” he wrote, “is meant to give it fresh life and to enkindle renewed interest in the Rosary’s place within Christian spirituality as a true doorway to the depths of the heart of Christ, ocean of joy and light, of suffering and of glory.” He added that the new mysteries would help the Rosary “become more fully ‘a compendium of the gospel.’”

You can read more analysis at the OSV link above.

And you can read John Paul’s beautiful letter on the rosary at the Vatican website, right here.