Our Lady of the Rosary October 7

According to Dominican tradition, in 1206, Dominic de Guzmán was in Prouille, France, attempting to convert the Albigensians to the Catholic faith. The young priest had little success until the day he received a vision of the Blessed Virgin, who gave him the rosary as a tool against heretics.

While Mary giving the rosary to Dominic is generally recognized as a legend, the development of this form of prayer owes much to the disciples of Saint Dominic, including the 15th-century priest and teacher, Alanus of Rupe.

In 1571, Pope Pius V organized a coalition of forces from Spain and small Christian kingdoms, republics, and military orders to save the Christian outposts in Cyprus, particularly the Venetian outpost of Famagusta, which, however, surrendered after a long siege on August 1 before the Christian forces set sail.

On October 7, 1571, the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic maritime states in southern Europe, sailed from Messina, Sicily, and encountered a powerful Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto. Knowing that the Christian forces were at a significant material disadvantage, Pope Pius V called upon all of Europe to pray the rosary for victory and led a rosary procession to Rome.

After about five hours of fighting on the northern edge of the Gulf of Corinth, off the Greece In the West, the combined navies of the Papal States, Venice, and Spain succeeded in stopping the Ottoman navy, slowing the Ottoman advance westward and denying them access to the Atlantic Ocean and the Americas.

If the Ottomans had won, there was a real possibility that an invasion of Italy could have followed so that the Ottoman Sultan, already claiming to be Emperor of the Romans, would have been in possession of both New and Old Rome.

Combined with events unfolding in Morocco where the Sa'adids managed to repel Ottoman advances, this confined naval power Turkish in the eastern Mediterranean. Although the Ottoman Empire was able to build more ships, it never fully recovered from the loss of trained sailors and marines, and was never again the Mediterranean naval power it had become the previous century when Constantinople fell.

Pius V established the Feast of Our Lady of Victory to commemorate the victory at Lepanto, which he attributed to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Dedications to Our Lady of Victory had preceded this papal declaration. In particular, Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, built the first shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Victory in gratitude for the Catholic victory over the Albigensians at the Battle of Muret on September 12, 1213.

In thanksgiving for the victory at the Battle of Bouvines in July 1214, Philip Augustus of France founded the Abbey of Notre-Dame de la Victoire, between Senlis and Mont l'Evêque.

In 1573, Pope Gregory XIII changed the name of the feast to the Feast of the Holy Rosary, celebrated on the first Sunday of October. Dominican friar Juan Lopez in his book of 1584 on the rosary states that the feast of the rosary was offered "in memory and in perpetual gratitude for the miraculous victory that the Lord gave to his Christian people that day against the Turkish armada."

In 1671, the observance of this feast was extended by Clement X to all of Spain, and a little later Clement XI, after the victory over the Turks won by Prince Eugene at the Battle of Petrovaradin on August 5, 1716 (the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows), ordered that the Feast of the Rosary be celebrated by the Universal Church.

Leo XIII elevated the feast to the rank of double second class and added to the Litany of Loreto the invocation "Queen of the Most Holy Rosary." On this feast, in every church where the Confraternity of the Rosary has been duly erected, a plenary indulgence of toties quoties is granted under certain conditions to all those who visit the Rosary Chapel or the statue of Our Lady there. This has been called the "Portiuncula" of the Rosary.

Pius X in 1913 changed the date to October 7, as part of his efforts to restore the celebration of Sunday liturgy. In 1960, under Pope John XXIII, it was listed as the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Rosary; and under the 1969 liturgical reforms of Pope Paul VI, Our Lady of the Rosary was mentioned as a mandatory memorial.