October - Month of the Holy Rosary

9th October 2011

In the Middle Ages Christians greeted Our Lady with the invocation Mystical Rose, the symbol of love and joy. As an expression of this affection her images were adorned with crowns or bouquets of roses called Rosarium in medieval Latin, as they still are today. If unable to recite the one hundred and fifty Psalms of the Liturgy of the Hours each day they would pray as many Hail Marys instead, using stones strung together by the decade or knots on a rope to keep count of each invocation and meditating on a particular aspect of Our Lord’s or Our Lady’s life.

The Hail Mary has long been amongst the richest prayers of the Church. Popes and Councils have frequently recommended it. The wording itself was finalised with the addition of the petition for a happy death: Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. We beseech the Virgin’s help in each situation now, and at the moment of our definitive meeting with Christ. The mysteries focus on the central events in the life of Jesus and Mary - in a sense being a summary of the liturgical year and of the whole Gospel, with petitions for Mary’s help, and manifestations of joy and exaltation before her virtue and power.

St Pius V attributed the 1571 victory of Lepanto to the intercession of the Blessed Mother, since a grave threat to the Faith soon came to an end when Rome and the Christian world invoked her patronage through the Rosary, and the petition to Our Lady Help of Christians was added to the Litany. From then on, the Roman Pontiffs encouraged devotion to the Blessed Virgin with renewed fervour as public and universal prayer, for the ordinary and extraordinary needs of the universal church and the nations of the entire world.

The Church devotes the month of October to the Rosary in order to honour our Blessed Mother in a special way. Our love for this devotion should be constantly renewed. Do holy ambitions, such as the Christians had who prayed for victory at Lepanto, enter into our stream of praise and petition during the Rosary?

Given our great need for help and our concern for the spiritual growth of our families, Our Lady’s help is as crucial today as it was long ago. The Rosary is a powerful weapon to enable us to win our interior battles and to help all souls.