OCTOBER IS THE MONTH OF THE HOLY ROSARY

 

OCTOBER IS THE MONTH OF THE HOLY ROSARY

The feast of Our Lady of the Rosary was instituted by Pope Saint Pius V originally as the feast of Our Lady of Victory in celebration of the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Lepanto, which took place off the southeastern coast of Greece on October 7, 1571.  The Turks were determined to invade Europe and impose Islam on the people, as they had already done elsewhere.  The Pope organized a multinational alliance called the Holy League to defend Christendom against the Muslims.  It consisted of the navies of the Spanish empire and the Italian maritime powers including Venice and Genoa.  The Ottomans were decisively defeated and their plans for the domination of Europe were crushed.

Before the battle Pius V had organized a Rosary crusade to pray against the Turks.  The Rosary had developed as a popular form of prayer in the early Middle Ages and was especially promoted by the Spanish priest, Saint Dominic (d. 1221) and the religious order of Dominicans.  It was already a well-known form of prayer when Pope Saint Pius V, who himself was a Dominican, called on Catholics in Europe to gather in their churches to pray the Rosary for victory over the infidels.  The sailors on the ships of the Holy League themselves prayed the Rosary before they went into battle.  Their prayers were answered, and Europe was saved.

Countless numbers of Christians have found the Rosary to be a great weapon against sin and a help to their perseverance in faith.  Mary is foreseen in the Book of Genesis as the woman whose heel “crushes the serpent’s head.”  She is a powerful defense against Satan, for she is the Mother of the Word made flesh and the holiest human person who ever lived (Christ was a divine Person).  When one is tempted to anger, despair, impurity, hopelessness, or any other sin, Mary comes to the rescue through the prayer of the Rosary.  This devotion unites the most important prayer in Christianity – the Our Father, taught by Jesus himself – with invocation to the one without whom we could not have been saved (since from her Christ received his humanity).  It celebrates our trinitarian faith by the solemn doxology that concludes each decade (“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit...).  The four sets of mysteries which we ponder when we pray the Rosary – the joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious – cover the whole life of Jesus, and are in themselves a proclamation of the Gospel.  They present the full story of human salvation.

The Rosary is a most flexible form of prayer.  You can say it while lying in bed, walking down the street, and kneeling in the church.  You can say it by yourself or with others.  You can interrupt it and start it back up again many times, helping you to fulfill the Pauline precept to pray without ceasing.  Hope and faith cannot be sustained without prayer, and the holy Rosary is one of the best ways to persevere in these gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus himself told the apostles that “they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1).  The Holy Spirit has given us a way to fulfill this precept by giving us the holy Rosary.