Our Lady of the Rosary

On October 7 the Church keeps the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary, instituted by Pope Pius V in the aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto. On October 7, 1571, a Holy League fleet — papal, Spanish, Venetian, and Genoese, under Don John of Austria — defeated the Ottoman fleet of Ali Pasha in the Gulf of Patras off western Greece. Pius V had ordered the Rosary prayed across Christendom for the battle's success; when the news reached Rome, he attributed the deliverance to the Virgin's intercession and instituted the feast as "Our Lady of Victory." Gregory XIII renamed it the feast of the Holy Rosary in 1573; Clement XI extended it to the universal Church in 1716 after Prince Eugene's victory over the Ottomans at Petrovaradin; and Pius X fixed it firmly to October 7 in 1913.

The Pontifical Shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary at Pompeii is the great Rosary shrine of southern Italy. It was founded by Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926), a Neapolitan lawyer who had been a satanist and was converted to the faith through the Rosary, building the sanctuary between 1876 and 1891 around a painting of Our Lady of the Rosary sent to him in 1875. Longo's Supplica — the prayer he composed — is recited at noon on May 8 and October 7 each year at the shrine, drawing crowds of thousands. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 26, 1980; his remains lie in the crypt of the basilica he built.

In Rome the feast's first home was the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, built by Paul V in the 1620s to commemorate Lepanto and dedicated to "Our Lady of Victory." The basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore keeps the Salus Populi Romani, the ancient Marian icon that Roman tradition ascribes to St. Luke — the image the Pompeii painting is said to copy. And the whole month of October has been dedicated to the Holy Rosary since the late nineteenth century, with daily parish Rosary devotions throughout the Catholic world.

The Rosary feast and Fatima are inseparable. At every one of the six apparitions at the Cova da Iria in 1917, from May 13 to October 13, the Virgin asked the children to pray the Rosary daily; the final apparition on October 13, the Sun Miracle, falls six days after the Rosary feast. The entire October cycle — from October 7 to October 13 — binds the Lepanto deliverance and the Fatima message into one Rosary octave, and pilgrims at Fatima pray the Rosary daily before the Chapel of the Apparitions. The Dominican Order, which spread the Rosary devotion from the fifteenth century, keeps the feast as a major Order solemnity.