Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary

Feast of Our Lady of the RosaryFeast of Our Lady of the Rosary
By Online: Fr. Victor Brown Thursday, October 7, 2010
Fr. Victor Brown’s Catholic Daily Message

In 1571, Pope Saint Pius V, one of our Dominican brothers who had been elected Pope, asked the people of Rome to pray the Rosary, to which he was very devoted, for a Christian naval victory over a Muslim fleet that was gathering off the coast of Greece with the intention of invading Italy and destroying the Church there. As soon as the battle had been fought, and before word could be sent by normal means to Rome, Saint Pius learned by supernatural means that the Christian fleet had been totally victorious and the Muslim threat to Europe had ended. As a result of that, the Pope decreed that October 7 would be celebrated as the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.


It is interesting that today, 439 years later, Islam is again, or perhaps I should say still, a threat to the Christian world. And what is the principal weapon that we have against it? The Rosary, of course, which Our Lady asks us to pray regularly. It is not by chance that in 1917 when she appeared in Portugal and identified herself as “The Lady of the Rosary,” her apparition place of choice was a place called Fatima, a Muslim name. Fatima was one of the daughters of the Islamic founder Mohammed. So we have the mother of Our Lord calling herself “the Lady of the Rosary” and being called by the Church Our Lady of Fatima.

Please, my dear friends, pray the Rosary regularly—daily, if at all possible—for the conversion of Islam and for peace between the Cross and the Crescent, the symbols of Christianity and Islam. It was the Rosary, not bombs or guns or merely human diplomacy, that brought about the conversion of Russia away from atheistic communism. We have this powerful weapon in our hands, highly promoted by the Mother of Christ. Let us use it!

Thank you for seeking God’s truth.
God bless you.
Father Victor Brown, O.P.