“Blessed Rosary of Mary, sweet chain linking us to God”

Today in this Extra-ordinary form of the Liturgy we celebrate the Solemnity of “Our Lady of the Rosary." The original title of this feast day was, “Our Lady of Victory.” The feast celebrated the great and miraculous naval victory of the fleet of the Holy Roman Empire’s Victory over the vastly superior fleet of the Ottoman Empire’s. The Christian fleet was outnumbered three to one. The stakes couldn’t be higher as the Turkish leader boasted he would turn St. Peter’s Basilica into a mosque after they won the battle, just as his forebear’s had done with Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, present day Istanbul. If the battle had been lost, this boast would have most certainly become a reality.

At the time, a Dominican Pope, Pope Puis V, saw the seriousness of the situation clearly and so instructed all the Churches of Italy to pray the rosary as the battle began. Through the faithfulness of so many Christians praying, from their heart, the most powerful weapon of the Rosary, a miracle occurred which allowed the Christian fleet to win an absolutely impossible battle. After the victory of the Christians at Lepanto, the Holy Father designated October 7th, as the feast day of Our Lady of Victory to commemorate the miraculous victory brought forth through the intercession of Our Lady; it is now known as the Solemnity of Our Lady of the Rosary who is of course still Our Lady of Victory.

I think it is easy for us to underestimate the power of the Rosary. Surely none of us here, but many other Catholics dismiss the Rosary as some outdated pious devotion, which was to done away with by Vatican II. Obviously those with this erroneous idea never read Vatican II. For let us not forget with whom we are dealing when we pray the Rosary; we are dealing with the Mother of God Himself. In fact, the Virgin Mary is described in one biblical verse, “Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array?”

At the onset of my recuperation shortly after my surgery, I again picked up the wonderful work by St. Louis de Montfort entitled, “The Secret of the Rosary.” In its pages St. Louis eloquently points out how important the Rosary is in our own lives and for our own times. How important a help, a necessary a help, the prayer of the Rosary is for us to obtain the grace we need to grow closer to Jesus through His Heavenly Mother-if prayed well and correctly, it opens us up to the graces available for us through the intercession of our Lady and in the Sacraments, especially the most Blessed Sacrament which is the Incarnate Son of Our Lady of the Rosary. St. Louis also reveals to us then how powerful a help the Rosary is toward our eternal salvation as well.

In the “Secret of the Rosary, “not only does St. Louis de Montfort teach us the importance of the Rosary, he also points out however that we need to understand the Rosary more deeply and learn to pray it correctly and more reverently and from the heart. He teaches us that the Rosary needs to be prayed with understanding, and it needs to be prayed well. We should ponder the meaning of each word, each phrase and not rush through it in order to get it prayed. Often I have heard the rosary prayed in churches in which the words are hardly distinguishable because it is be said, I don’t say prayed, in such a rush.

Praying the Rosary well is sometimes very, very hard. We have to work hard to try to overcome the many distractions that besiege us as we try to work hard on meditating and contemplating the mysteries of the Rosary which reveal to us the mysteries of the life of Jesus and so open to us a deeper inner life with Him. WE may not always be successful in overcoming the distractions but if we are making an intense effort calling on the Holy Spirit’s help we are pleasing Our Lady and so Pleasing God.

The Rosary prayed well is the prayer to help us to daily live out our consecration to Jesus through Mary in union with St. Joseph. Through it, we begin to more and more walk, through each event of our daily lives, in union with Jesus, in Jesus and for Jesus with the help of His Mother and ours. The rosary is a Christo-centric prayer and so it is a Eucharistic centered prayer. The core of the Hail Mary, as shown by the middle word, is the Jesus, and Jesus is the Eucharist…Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, THE EUCHARIST.

And so, St. Louis in revealing to us the secret of the Rosary also reveals to us how much we need the Rosary in the great struggle we are facing in our world today. The battle we are facing is many times greater than the People of God and the world faced during the Battle of Lepanto. This is why Our Lady came to Fatima; she came to give us the secret to win the spiritual battle that is raging right now in our country and in our world. It is as Blessed Pope John Paul II said the, “final confrontation between the Church and the Anti Church, the Gospel and the anti-Gospel.”

These are decisive times and we and our families, and our world, need the Rosary now more than ever. Our Lady of Fatima remembered to asked us to pray the Rosary daily-she said it even had the power to end wars and so also to prevent them. She offered us the Rosary along with the Brown Scapular, worn as a sign of our total Consecration to her, as the essential spiritual weapons of our troubled times and which lead us to Eucharistic Adoration the source of all our strength and life and of course Love.

In this great Year of Faith as proclaimed by Pope Benedict, let us commit, if we are not doing so, to pray the rosary daily; and if we are doing so, to pray the Rosary more fervently and reverently-to pray the Rosary well. Let us become addicted to the Holy Rosary. Let us also commit, if we are not doing so, to daily pray the Rosary as a family, even if we begin by praying only a decade-the Rosary is the best family prayer beside the Sacred Liturgy. And let us try to do everything we can to not only increase our own devotion and our families devotion to the Most Holy Rosary but to spread this devotion to others in our parish family and among our acquaintances, even among our non-Catholic acquaintances, for the rosary is a biblical prayer that leads us to Jesus.

In the Rosary we truly enter into the School of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and are led through the heart of the mother closer to Her Son’s True Present in the Holy Eucharist, falling in love with Him three. In light of this, I have one other suggestion, and that is to read or reread the wonderful and important Apostolic Letter of Blessed John Paul II on the Rosary entitled, Rosarium Virginis Mariae; on the Most Holy Rosary (October 16, 2002) In its pages he tells us that the Rosary, “Simple yet profound, it still remains, at the dawn of this third millennium, a prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness.” When we pray the rosary through the eyes of our soul, we see the life of Christ through the eyes of His Mother. The Hail Mary’s become as background music as she takes us by the hand and walks with us leading us to a living communion with Jesus-the “Blessed Rosary of Mary, (is therefore a) sweet chain linking us to God”

John Paul said the Rosary is as well a prayer for peace and for the family. And responding to so many who after Vatican II objected that the Rosary is a distraction to the Sacred Liturgy, John Paul tells us that Pope Paul VI made clear, not only does this prayer not conflict with the Liturgy, it sustains it, since it serves as an excellent introduction and a faithful echo of the Liturgy, enabling people to participate fully and interiorly in it (the Liturgy) and to reap its fruits in their daily lives.

And so, again, in this Year of Faith, beginning in just a few days-October 11th, let us renew and even increase our efforts through Our Lady’s powerful intercession and through her Holy Rosary to grow in our Faith, Hope and Love in Jesus Truly Present in the Holy Eucharist the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar and in His Holy Catholic Church-this is the answer and solution to all of our modern day troubles.

So let us pray the Rosary with firm faith, hope and love as a way of actively partaking in the great battle of our day. In this great battle against Our Blessed Lord and His Catholic Church, our faithfulness and steadfastness will decide the outcome not only of the battle, but also, the outcome of our own eternal salvation, as well as the eternal salvation of millions of other souls. The stakes could not be higher, but we have hope for we have the secret to Victory-the Secret of the Most Holy Rosary.

Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary, Our Lady of Victory, pray for us sinners who have recourse to thee. Totus Tuus. Amen.