The eRosary was launched on October 15 2019 as part of ‘Extraordinary Mission Month’ by Vatican City and the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network – an online media initiative by the Catholic church that accompanies Pope Francis’s activity (and whomever the instated Pope of the time), including the official prayer platform and app ‘Click to Pray’. The ‘smart rosary’, part-smart device, part-devotional object, was commissioned with the aim ‘at praying for world peace’ while engaging new, digitally literate, religious communities. It retailed at $109 / 99 Euro / £85 on its first release.

Targeted primarily at younger and digitally engaged audiences, the eRosary serves as an interactive, app-driven tool to learn how to pray with the rosary. When activated, the user can choose either to pray the standard rosary, a contemplative Rosary and different thematic rosaries that will be updated every year on an app that is connected. It can be worn as a bracelet, similarly to a more traditional rosary bracelet, and is activated by making the sign of the cross on the haptic face of the device. The bracelet has ten consecutive agate and hematite beads to make up a decade, an important element of praying with a rosary for those in the Catholic faith. It is synchronised with the popular Click to Pray platform, allowing for users to connect with content across multiple platforms such as apps and audiobooks, set reminders for prayer and share the data that is stored by the device, as it also acts as a health tracker, encouraging users to pursue a healthy lifestyle.

The eRosary was originally developed for the Vatican by Taiwanese company GadgeTek Inc. (GTI), a subsidiary company of Acer founded in 2018 and dedicated to developing ‘lifestyle’ technology, previously developing devices to monitor air quality use in the home, to previous smart objects for religious groups such as the Leap Beads for followers of Buddhism. The device was then sold and manufactured for general distribution by Acer, although its main countries for release were primarily Italy, Brazil and the United States, with limited release in the United Kingdom.

On its initial release in 2019, the eRosary was subject to a security flaw which was exploited by a security researcher Baptiste Robert, who noticed a vulnerability in the device’s Android application. Robert could take over and gain access to the user’s sensitive profile information through simply knowing the user’s email address. Robert sent this report to the Vatican, in order to alert and then aid them in removing the security concern. Considering the discreet nature of a user’s religious life, alongside the collection of personal information, this raises a particular tension as we share so much more of our private, in this case spiritual, lives with technological devices and networks.

The choice to sell a religious object as such a high price point has also been criticised by members of the church, with Abbot Pierre Amar, an author of a French online blog run by priests denouncing the eRosary as ‘a scandal’.