Picking up her Catholic rosary, Meg, a 24-year-old from Maine, begins her prayers like this: “Hail Persephone, full of strength and beauty. … Blessed are you and blessed is the cycle of your life.

‘The Virgin Mary and her rosary saved my life,” writes Father Donald Calloway, a priest with the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, in his new book, Champions of the Rosary: The History and ...