Southern Nebraska Register
Catholic News Agency
Fifth-graders at St. Teresa School in Lincoln, under the direction of teacher Sr. Mary Faustina, C.K., led the school in praying the Sorrowful Mysteries in a “living rosary” Oct. 7.
While some students acted out the mysteries, others held roses up to each prayer.
The Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary Oct. 7. Known for several centuries by the alternate title of “Our Lady of Victory,” the feast day takes place in honor of a 16th century naval victory which secured Europe against Turkish invasion. Pope St. Pius V attributed the victory to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was invoked on the day of the battle through a campaign to pray the Rosary throughout Europe.
Pope Leo XIII was particularly devoted to Our Lady of the Rosary, producing 11 encyclicals on the subject of this feast and its importance. In the first, 1883’s “Supremi Apostolatus Officio,” he echoed the words of the oldest known Marian prayer (known in the Latin tradition as the “Sub Tuum Praesidium”), when he wrote, “It has always been the habit of Catholics in danger and in troublous times to fly for refuge to Mary.”
“This devotion, so great and so confident, to the august Queen of Heaven,” Pope Leo continued, “has never shone forth with such brilliancy as when the militant Church of God has seemed to be endangered by the violence of heresy … or by an intolerable moral corruption, or by the attacks of powerful enemies.” Foremost among such “attacks” was the battle of Lepanto, a perilous and decisive moment in European and world history.
Troops of the Turkish Ottoman Empire had invaded and occupied the Byzantine empire by 1453, bringing a large portion of the increasingly divided Christian world under a version of Islamic law. For the next 100 years, the Turks expanded westward on land, and asserted naval power in the Mediterranean. In 1565 they attacked Malta, envisioning an eventual invasion of Rome. Though repelled at Malta, the Turks captured Cyprus in the fall of 1570.
The next year, three Catholic powers on the continent – Genoa, Spain, and the Papal States – formed an alliance called the Holy League, to defend their Christian civilization against Turkish invasion. Its fleets sailed to confront the Turks near the west coast of Greece Oct.7, 1571.
Crew members on more than 200 ships prayed the rosary in preparation for the battle – as did Christians throughout Europe, encouraged by the pope to gather in their churches to invoke the Virgin Mary against the daunting Turkish forces.
Some accounts say Pope Pius V was granted a miraculous vision of the Holy League’s stunning victory. Without a doubt, the pope understood the significance of the day’s events, when he was eventually informed that all but 13 of the nearly 300 Turkish ships had been captured or sunk. He was moved to institute the feast now celebrated universally as Our Lady of the Rosary.
“Turkish victory at Lepanto would have been a catastrophe of the first magnitude for Christendom,” wrote military historian John F. Guilmartin, Jr., “and Europe would have followed a historical trajectory strikingly different from that which obtained.”
Tradition holds that St. Dominic (d. 1221) devised the rosary as we know it. The rosary is introduced by the Creed, the Our Father, three Hail Marys and the Doxology (“Glory Be”), and concluded with the Salve Regina. The rosary involves the recitation of five decades consisting of the Our Father, 10 Hail Marys and the Doxology. During this recitation, the individual praying meditates on the mysteries of Christ’s life and the faithful witness of the Blessed Mother.
Most of the words of the rosary come directly from Scripture. The words of the Our Father are those Christ taught his disciples to pray in Matthew 6:9–13.
The Hail Mary also comes straight from the Bible. The first part, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” comes from Luke 1:28, and the second, “Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,” is found in Luke 1:42.
The majority of the events in the decades of the rosary—divided into four sets of mysteries: joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious—are also found in Scripture.
