In the middle of the Extraordinary Missionary Month of October, the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network launched the “Click To Pray eRosary” at a press conference in the Vatican on October 15. October is also the month of the Rosary.

“The Click To Pray eRosary” is an interactive, smart and app-driven wearable device that serves as a tool for learning how to pray the rosary for peace in the world. Serving as a “tool for learning how to pray the rosary, it can be worn as a bracelet with ten rosary beads and is activated by making the sign of the cross. It is synchronized with a free app of the same name, which allows access to an audio guide, exclusive images and personalized content about the praying of the Rosary.

Organizers say it is within the reach of everyone. Aimed at the peripheral frontiers of the digital world where the young people dwell, the Click To Pray eRosary serves as a technology-based teaching tool to help young people pray the Rosary for peace and to contemplate the Gospel. The project brings together the best of the Church’s spiritual tradition and the latest advances of the technological world.

Physically, the device consists of ten consecutive black agate and hematite rosary beads, and of a smart cross which stores all the technological data connected to the app. When activated, the user has the possibility to choose either to pray the standard rosary, a contemplative Rosary and different kinds of thematic rosaries that will be updated every year. Once the prayer begins, the smart rosary shows the user’s progress throughout the different mysteries and keeps track of each rosary completed.

This smart rosary belongs to the family of “Click To Pray”, the official prayer app of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network (where Pope Francis has his own personal profile) that connects thousands of people around the globe to pray every day. The Click To Pray eRosary is also intended to accompany him in his daily and monthly intentions in order to build a world with the taste of the Gospel.

The project of the Click To Pray eRosary is an initiative of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, a pontifical work with the mission of mobilizing Catholics through prayer and action, in the face of the challenges confronting humanity and the mission of the Church. These challenges are addressed in the form of prayer intentions each month, entrusted by the Pope to the entire Church. The network has produced all the special contents of this smart rosary.

Father Frederic Fornos, the international director of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, has said Tuesday that praying the rosary for world peace is something Pope Francis asked from every young person participating in World Youth Day in Panama earlier this year.

“Our world needs peace. There’s so much cruelty and violence. Peace is at the heart of the mission of the disciples of Christ,” Fornos said.

“In a world of indifference in comparison to so many injustices, poverty, denied elementary rights,” he said, “praying for peace means being reconciled in our daily relationships, with the poorest, with the foreigner, with different cultures and spiritual and religious traditions, but also with our land, our forests, rivers and oceans.”

The Jesuit priest said that praying the rosary is a “beautiful spiritual tradition to contemplate the Gospel with Mary,” but that despite being a popular prayer, it’s not sufficiently known, and sometimes it’s even “despised,” seen as a “devotion and a mechanical repetition.”

“This prayer brings our hearts closer to the Heart of Jesus,” Fornos said. “The rosary helps us to go deep into the Gospel, with its joyful, luminous, painful and glorious, mysteries that speak of our life.”

A press release said the initiative is “aimed at the peripheral frontiers of the digital world where the young people dwell,” and it serves as a “technology-based pedagogy to teach the young how to pray the Rosary, how to pray it for peace [and] how to contemplate the Gospel.”

Therefore, it said, this project brings together the best of the Church’s spiritual tradition with the latest technological advances.

The app includes three ways to pray the rosary: the traditional way, showing images of the Gospel to facilitate the meditation; a contemplative one, which touches on the challenges of humanity and the Church’s mission, with “contemporary images of the Gospel, from Father Mark Rupnik, a Jesuit; and a “themed” rosary. The latest option includes a rosary for young people, with others to follow on migrants and refugees, Francis’s ecological encyclical Laudato Si’, and vocations.

Also at the presentation was Monsignor Lucio Ruiz, secretary of the Vatican’s communications department. He said the initiative is born of a culture “that sees us all connected,” sharing from pictures to the result of training sessions, through phones, watches and computers.

“While the expression ‘digitize prayer’” can sound strange, he said, “the right reading of this initiative should be directed towards creating virtuous networks, sharing spaces for pilgrim communities --even in the digital world--who want to share, who want to support one another, who want to walk together!”

The tool, he said, aims at helping people rediscover the importance of “sharing,” also in spiritual life, “which has always been fundamental in the life of the People of God!”

The aim of the eRosary, he said, is to bring people together, even in virtual spaces, “with a missionary zeal, living the Gospel and preaching the Message to the outermost borders of the Earth.”

According to Jerri Kao, CEO of the technology company behind the device, the eRosary is a “bridge between technology and our need of prayer. We’re hoping to reach other believers, so that they pray more for the good of human beings.”

“I never thought that innovation could serve such an old and beloved prayer of the Church,” said Juan de la Torre, head of La Machi, a communications company that helped produce the app along with the communications of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network. Both are also behind the pope’s monthly prayer videos.

“The Church is perhaps the most innovative institution in communications, from the first Apostles, to the development of newspapers and the radio. As a state, it was one of the first to have its own website,” he noted.

“Pope Francis says that the Rosary is the prayer of his heart,” Fornos said. “He asked last year during the month of October for Catholics to pray the Rosary intensely for the Church.”