Our Lady of the Rosary, and why the feast is on 7 October
- Published
Today, 7 October, the Church keeps the memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary. It is one of the few feasts in the calendar that is not about an event in Our Lady’s life or a title given her in Scripture, but about a prayer — and about a particular seventh of October.
A battle, and a change of name
On 7 October 1571 a fleet gathered by the Christian states of the Mediterranean met the Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Corinth, off Lepanto. Pope St Pius V, a Dominican, had asked for the Rosary to be prayed across Europe while it happened. When the news came back he put the day in the calendar as Our Lady of Victory.
The name did not stay. Gregory XIII changed it to the feast of the Holy Rosary, Pius X fixed it to 7 October wherever it had drifted, and the calendar we use now calls it simply Our Lady of the Rosary. The shift is worth noticing: a feast that began as thanksgiving for one battle ended as a feast of the prayer itself — which is the part anyone can take up, in any century, without a fleet.
The month, and the twenty mysteries
October is kept as the month of the Rosary, a custom Leo XIII pressed on the whole Church in a series of letters through the 1880s. For most of its history the Rosary had fifteen mysteries in three sets — the Joyful, the Sorrowful and the Glorious. In 2002 John Paul II proposed a fourth, the Luminous, covering the public ministry between the childhood and the Passion: the baptism in the Jordan, Cana, the preaching of the Kingdom, the Transfiguration, and the institution of the Eucharist. Twenty, and nobody is obliged to the new five.
It is a prayer that survives being said badly, which is most of why it has lasted. It can be prayed in a car, in a hospital corridor, in a language you are losing, or by somebody who cannot read. There is no other prayer of the Church about which all of that is true at once.
The Rosary at the centre
It is not an extra here. Every full retreat morning at Somersby opens with the Angelus and the Rosary at seven o’clock, before the first talk and before breakfast, and the first evening of a residential retreat begins with the Rosary too. The list of what to bring for a residential retreat has six practical items on it — and a Rosary.
The Marian Retreat, this Friday
Two days after the feast, on Friday 9 October, the Marian Retreat opens at the centre and runs until the Sunday afternoon. The schedule has that and everything else coming up.