By Susan Gallagher

When rosaries crafted by members of Hamilton’s St. Francis of Assisi Parish go to distant parts of the world, it’s often with help of a retired flight attendant who lives in Florida and runs an informal courier service tied to her globe-trotting network of contacts.

Six Hamilton women making rosaries for the past four years or so produce about 300 a month for missions, military personnel, inmates, seminarians and others. The women use ordinary delivery services for U.S. addresses, but when the destination is abroad and the delivery cost daunting, Mary Ann Lynch of Tamarac, Fla., gets involved.

Retired after an airline career that spanned almost 40 years and allowed her to serve Pope John Paul II during his 1995 journey to the United States, Lynch maintains an extensive network of contacts who transport rosaries practically worldwide— and free of charge—on business and leisure trips.

When she was flying regularly, Lynch herself delivered rosaries made by an array of people, some in groups such as the one at St. Francis of Assisi Parish. Religious sisters and brothers were among the people to whom she delivered rosaries for distribution. “Wherever I went, there was someone to receive them,” she says. Now that she’s retired and cares for her elderly mother in south Florida, she relies on others for the long-distance transport.

“I didn’t set up the (rosary) network,” Lynch said in a phone interview. “God set it up. Last year alone, 326,000 rosaries went through my garage.”

Word of her service as a rosary courier spread when she was a flight attendant traveling the world. She says it was in Calcutta 30 years ago that she first met Mother Teresa, a meeting followed by a span of time in which Lynch worked with Mother Teresa’s missionaries during long airline layovers. Today Lynch calls rosary makers “hidden missionaries.” They work quietly and often out of sight, but have a big impact on the spiritual lives of people the world over, she says.

“One day, because of the seeds you have sown, we will have peace on earth as it is in heaven,” Lynch says in a letter of acknowledgement to people who send her rosaries they have made.

The Hamilton group’s Jan Driscoll, who has produced 150 rosaries and more in just a month, has seen poverty during her travels abroad and recalls reading about a village in which people shared a single rosary. She hopes that by making them, she can relieve a bit of the scarcity.

“Sometimes it is hard for we who have everything to realize the needs in poor countries where people have nothing—they don’t even have a rosary,” she says.

Peggy Smith of the Hamilton group says its members mostly work at home, but meet for one afternoon a month at St. Francis of Assisi Parish. They buy most of their materials from Our Lady’s Rosary Makers, a Louisville, Ky., nonprofit that says the thousands of people it supplies make 7 million rosaries annually. Our Lady’s serves as a clearinghouse for information about mission fields where rosaries are needed.

The women at St. Francis of Assisi personally cover the cost of their supplies and the postage to get finished rosaries to Lynch in Tamarac, about 10 miles from Fort Lauderdale.

“The women who are involved really like doing this and are passionate about it,” says Smith, whose fellow rosary makers in addition to Driscoll are Elaine Kuchera, Dee Sago, Kim Trinh and Debbie Hagen.

Lynch says people who receive gifts of rosaries that are made in places like Hamilton and then given away “are touched by the incredible generosity of these souls. They are affecting the world.”


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 26, No. 7, July 16, 2010.