Feast day: October 7
Our Lady of the Rosary
Established after the Battle of Lepanto (1571), when Christendom credited the Rosary prayed across Europe with the fleet's survival.
The feast of October 7 honors Mary under the title of the Holy Rosary, and it was born of a famous deliverance. In 1571 the fleets of Christian Europe met the navy of the Ottoman Empire, then advancing on the Mediterranean, in a great sea-battle off Lepanto. Pope St. Pius V, a Dominican who loved the Rosary, called on the faithful to pray it for the outcome, and the confraternities of the Rosary processed through Rome as the battle was fought.
The Christian fleet won an overwhelming victory that turned back the threat, and the pope, learning of it, attributed the triumph to the intercession of Our Lady obtained through the Rosary. He ordered an annual commemoration, first called 'Our Lady of Victory' and then the feast of the Holy Rosary, kept on the anniversary of the battle.
The Rosary itself — the weaving of the Our Father and the Hail Mary together with meditation on the mysteries of the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ — had grown up over the preceding centuries and was especially spread by the Dominican order, which traced it by tradition to St. Dominic. It became the great popular prayer of the Western Church, a way for ordinary people to contemplate the whole Gospel through Mary's eyes.
Later popes extended the feast to the universal Church, and Leo XIII, the 'Rosary Pope,' devoted the whole month of October to it and wrote repeatedly urging the faithful to take it up. The feast celebrates not a battle so much as the power of humble, persevering prayer, and Mary's nearness to her people through the beads worn smooth in their hands.
Pope Pius V asked all Europe to pray the Rosary as the fleets met at Lepanto. The feast was first called 'Our Lady of Victory.'
Image: Simone Cantarini (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/13189a.htm
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