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The Vatican’s $129 ‘Smart’ Rosary Is a Fitness Tracker for Your Soul
It tracks prayers like other wearables track steps. It also tracks steps.
My mother often prays the rosary, and it’s something she does more regularly since she retired. But while I have collected rosaries over the years, I use them as wall decor or for fashion purposes, never as a tool for prayer. I don’t know anyone my age who uses a rosary to pray, and I think of the tradition as reserved for elderly Catholics.
So I was surprised when I spotted an announcement that the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, Pope Francis’ prayer initiative, introduced a €100 “eRosary.” The bracelet rosary pairs with a smartphone app to guide users through each step in the series of prayers. Users shake their bracelet twice to move on to the next prayer, and the text of each prayer displays on the app, which also includes a dashboard that tracks how many rosaries one has prayed, and an option to set prayer reminders for specific times. Like other smart wearables, the rosary bracelet keeps track of your steps, location, and calories burned, ostensibly to give you an extra incentive to wear it.
While on its face, a “smart” version of the centuries-old rosary, complete with fitness tracker, may seem ridiculous, and the device’s instructions to activate it by making the sign of the cross scream gimmick, I wondered if such a device could actually be helpful to my spiritual life.
After all, I love my Samsung Galaxy Watch and I use the Calm app to combat my anxiety. Why should prayer be exempt from our modern fixation on tracking technology?
The original rosary was itself a sort of technology back in 1520 when Pope Leo X approved the use of the rosary because, as the Catholic lifestyle website Busted Halo explains, “in those days, many were illiterate, so the rosary allowed anyone to pray with familiar words from scripture.”
Pope Francis’ eRosary seems to have similar aims. In a statement, the Worldwide Prayer Network said the device is “aimed at the peripheral frontiers of the digital world where…
