Lizares: Rosary, the powerful weapon

THE feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary is held every October 7.

The rosary is synonymous to Our Lady but it more than just a devotion to her. It is said that the beads and chain of the rosary are often a reflection of our character and our hope. As Catholics, don’t we bury our dead with rosaries carefully wounded in their folded hands?

Praying the rosary is reflecting on Our Most Holy Mother's experiences and the life of Jesus. We become the person who bore all things for the sake of obedience to God's will. 

Sister Lucia of Fatima told us that "There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot solve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary. With the Holy Rosary we will save ourselves. We will sanctify ourselves. We will console Our Lord and obtain the salvation of many souls." Let us know and believe this is true. 

How did we first come to know about the rosary? In 1214, St. Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans), was battling to convert the Albigensians back to the Catholic faith with little success. He attributed this to the poor example of the Catholics. Alone, he went to the forest, wept and prayed continuously for three days. He flogged his body and after much fasting, pain, and exhaustion, he passed into a coma.

While in a coma, Dominic experienced an apparition of Blessed Mother Mary with three angels asking him: “Dear Dominic, do you know which weapon the Blessed Trinity wants to use to reform the world?” The Blessed Mother continued: “I want you to know that, in this kind of warfare, the battering ram has always been the Angelic Psalter which is the foundation stone of the New Testament. Therefore if you want to reach these hardened souls and win them over to God, preach my Psalter.”

Shortly after this apparition, St Dominic preached the Holy Rosary to the heretics, however, he modified the psalter in compliance with the instruction during the apparition. He set apart 15 mysteries of the rosary, grouped them into three sets of five decades each.The groupings were designated as Joyous Mysteries, Sorrowful Mysteries and Glorious Mysteries. This design helped the Albigensian heretics to better understand and to imitate the virtuous life of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Immaculate and Blessed Mary.

So why is October 7 set apart as the Feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary?

Known for its alternate title of “Our Lady of Victory,” the feast day takes place in honor of a 16th century naval victory which secured Europe against Turkish invasion. Pope St. Pius V attributed the victory to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was invoked on the day of the battle through a campaign to pray the Rosary throughout Europe.

Through back history: Troops of the Turkish Ottoman Empire had invaded and occupied the Byzantine Empire by 1453, bringing a large portion of the increasingly divided Christian world under a version of Islamic law.

For the next hundred years, the Turks expanded their empire westward on land, and asserted their naval power in the Mediterranean. In 1565 they attacked Malta, envisioning an eventual invasion of Rome. Though repelled at Malta, the Turks captured Cyprus in the fall of 1570. The next year, three Catholic powers on the continent – Genoa, Spain, and the Papal States formed an alliance called the Holy League, to defend their Christian civilization against Turkish invasion. Its fleets sailed to confront the Turks near the west coast of Greece on October 7, 1571.

Crew members on more than 200 ships prayed the Rosary in preparation for the battle as did Christians throughout Europe, encouraged by the Pope to gather in their churches to invoke the Virgin Mary against the daunting Turkish forces.

Some accounts say that Pope Pius V was granted a miraculous vision of the Holy League's stunning victory. Without a doubt, the Pope understood the significance of the day's events, when he was eventually informed that all but 13 of the nearly 300 Turkish ships had been captured or sunk. He was moved to institute the feast now celebrated universally as Our Lady of the Rosary.

“Turkish victory at Lepanto would have been a catastrophe of the first magnitude for Christendom,” wrote military historian John F. Guilmartin, Jr. If the Battle of Lepanto was not won with the intercession of Our Lady with the whole of Europe praying the rosary, Europe would have been an Islamic nation a long time ago.

We also know that on October 13, 1917, Our Lady of Fatima told the shepherd children, "I am the Lady of the Rosary". In 1987 as well, during the civil war between the anti-clerical Sandinista government in Nicaragua, a sacristan named Bernardo Martinez reported seeing an apparition of Our Lady who urged him to pray the rosary and work for peace.

The month of October is dedicated to praying the Holy Rosary. Perhaps what happened in the Battle of Lepanto should be refreshed in everyone’s minds especially with the war being waged by the extremist Islamic forces and Isis.

Internationally, nationally and even personally, we should make an effort to pray the rosary invoking the Blessed Mother to intercede in battles for territory, causes and morality. The evil one is so present in the world. We need the Blessed Mother to help us and the powerful weapon is the rosary.

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