Our Lady of the Rosary (2026)

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

This feast day was instituted by Pope Pius V in thanksgiving for Our Lady’s assistance in the Christian victory over the Turks at Lepanto on October 7, 1571. The Pontiff foretold that the rosary would win that battle in 1569, and Clement XI extended this feast to the universal Church in 1716.

We’re told when the angel came to her, he said, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). The angel greeted Our Lady in this way, which is now so familiar to us, since we’ve often repeated the very same words to her.

In the Middle Ages, Christians greeted Our Lady with the invocation “Mystical Rose,” a symbol of love and joy. As an expression of this affection, her images were adorned with crowns or bouquets of roses called rosarium in medieval Latin, as they still are today. Whoever was unable to recite the 150 Psalms of the Liturgy of the Hours each day would pray as many Hail Marys instead. The faithful used stones strung together by the decade or knots on a rope to keep account of each invocation. At the same time, they would meditate on a particular aspect of the life of Our Lord or of Our Lady. The Hail Mary has long been among the richest prayers of the Church. Popes and councils have frequently recommended it.

The wording itself would acquire its final form with the addition of the petition for a happy death: “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” We beseech Our Lady’s help in each situation now and to the climactic moment of our definitive meeting with Christ.

The mysteries focus on the central events in the life of Jesus and Mary. In a sense, they are a summary of the liturgical year and of the whole Gospel. The prayers of the litany that ensue are a song of love for Our Lady. They are Marian praises, petitions for her help, and manifestations of joy and exultation before her virtue and power.

There’s a story told of a nun in Canada who was running a primary school. Some of the teachers were absent, she had to fill in a bit. She was a bit stressed out. Then there was a knock at the classroom door — another interruption. But when she opened it, she was relieved to see it was just a salesman looking for a signature on a check or something. He pulled out a biro out of his pocket and attached to the biro was a rosary beads. She said to him, “Oh, so you’re a Catholic.” He said, “No, I’m not a Catholic. I’m a Protestant, but I pray the rosary every day.”

Now her curiosity was piqued. A Protestant who prays the rosary every day. She asked him, “Well, how is that?” When she’d opened the door, he had sort of sensed a certain anxiety or stress in her. He didn’t want to complicate her life too much. He said, “Oh, it’s a long story.” But she was interested. She encouraged him, “No, it’s okay, the kids are doing an exam or test. Tell me your story.”

He began to relate how before the Second World War, he was called up to the Canadian army. He was billeted in a sort of a hut with maybe a hundred other people in their squadron or whatever. They were expecting a new boss. The boss arrived by plane. They went out of the hut to see what he looked like. They presumed he would disappear to the officers’ quarters. But about an hour later, he appeared in their hut and bunked down on one of their bunk beds. Of course, they liked him immediately, him being one of them. But then he knelt down and said the rosary.

This man said, “We didn’t know what he was doing. We had been together for six months, but we’d never talked religion. There were some Catholics there, but very few. When he finished the rosary, he turned around and he said to us, ‘Well, I hope you guys don’t mind a guy saying some prayers because where we’re going, we’re going to need all the prayers we can get.’” They were being trained to go on bombing missions in Europe, so he said, “We couldn’t argue with that. We agreed with him completely. The following night, the Catholics who were in the group joined him for the rosary. By the end of the week, all of us were praying the rosary, the whole hundred of us.”

“Then came the time we were moved over to the UK, and we eventually went on bombing missions over Germany, over Europe.” This officer said, “We had been praying the rosary every single night. When we go on our bombing missions, if you like, we can continue to say the rosary. So I will lead from my cockpit and you answer from your cockpit.” He said, “That’s what we did. We went on something like 28 bombing missions over Germany. He would lead the rosary, we would reply from our cockpit as the bombs were falling all over Europe.”

“After some time, it began to be noticed that we had not lost any men or any planes. This became a bit of a mystery for people back at the base. They would ask us, ‘What’s your secret?’ But we all knew what our secret was. At the end of the war, we all got back safely to Canada, and all of our planes got back safely also. Ever since then, I’ve said my rosary every single day. At night when I change my trousers, the first thing I change, even before my wallet, is my rosary.”

There was the testimony of a Protestant who prays the rosary every day.

St. Pius V attributed the victory of Lepanto to the intercession of Our Lady, since a grave threat to the faith soon came to an end when Rome and the Christian world invoked her patronage through the rosary. Today’s feast recalls that wonderful event. On the occasion of its institution, the petition of Our Lady, Help of Christians was added to the litany.

John XXIII says, “From that moment on, the Roman Pontiffs would encourage devotion to the Blessed Virgin with renewed fervor as public and universal prayer for the ordinary and extraordinary needs of the universal Church and the nations of the entire world.”

The Church devotes the month of October to the rosary in order to honor Our Lady in a special way. Our love for this devotion should be constantly renewed. We could ask ourselves how is our contemplation of the various mysteries. Do holy ambitions, such as the Christians had who prayed for victory at Lepanto, enter into our stream of praise and petition during the rosary?

Given our great need for help and our concern for the spiritual growth of our families, Our Lady’s presence is crucial. There are always the needs of the friends we do apostolate with, as St. Josemaria reminds us, to bring constantly to mind.

Today, as in other times, the rosary must be a powerful weapon to enable us to win our interior struggle and to help all souls.

The name “rosary” comes from the group of prayers to Our Lady, which we gather like so many roses for her. St. Bernard of Clairvaux gave the term a different sense by referring to each day of her life as either a snow-colored or a crimson rose — white roses and red ones. The white of her serenity and of purity, the red of suffering and of love.

One writer says, have we often tried to unravel the content of her life day by day by passing the beads through our hands? This is what it means to contemplate the lives of Jesus and of Mary, while the decades successively unfurl before our mind and heart.

In one way or another, we always accompany the Blessed Virgin in the consideration of these mysteries, so that the rosary involves much more than the repetition of the Hail Mary.

One writer says we divide the scenes into three groups — joyful, sorrowful, and glorious — and meditate on different aspects of the great mysteries of salvation, including the incarnation, the redemption, and the resurrection. We make an effort to pray with love, perhaps adding a petition to each decade or every invocation so as to avoid routine.

With attentive and thoughtful devotion, we contemplate the mysteries. Pondering each one helps us to foster true piety, since each consideration gradually reveals to us the habitual dispositions of Christ and his Blessed Mother in the presence of God the Father, with whom we can identify in our own behavior. We rejoice as the events leading to our salvation unfold and suffer compassionately with the Holy Family during their many trials.

We look ahead with sure hope, said one writer, towards the final radiance and glorious victory of the Risen Christ. We can pause for a few seconds — three or four — in silent meditation to consider each mystery of the rosary before reciting the Our Father and the Hail Mary. In this way, we can involve ourselves in the particular scene as one more person and imagine the manner of the daily activities of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Through reflection on the lessons of the various scenes, the rosary becomes a conversation with Mary, leading to intimacy with her Son. In the midst of our everyday concerns, we can gain a keen familiarity with the truths of faith, and at the same time practice recollection while at work or at our leisure. We thus become increasingly more cheerful and refine our relations with those around us. The life of Jesus and Mary becomes the love of our life as we learn to perceive their ordinary greatness in a deeper way.

How true are the poet’s verses which say, “You who are tired, who tire and are slow to pray, because the same words we always say have little understanding what it is to be in love forever as I and she.”

After contemplating the lives of Jesus and Our Lady during the recitation of the Our Fathers and Hail Marys, we finish the rosary with the Litany of Loreto. The compilation of invocations burst forth with vivid praise in all the splendor of the images expressed in these phrases. The form of the particular praises and petitions varies according to country, family, and personal piety. The origin of the Litany of Loreto goes back to the first centuries of Christianity. Then it consisted of short dialogue prayers between the celebrant and the faithful. They focused above all on beseeching divine mercy and were said at Mass and during processions. At first, they were directed to Our Lord, but soon invocations to the Blessed Virgin and other saints developed as well.

The original praises of the Marian litany stemmed from popular expressions of loving admiration which accrued over time. Many come from the writings of the Eastern Fathers of the Church. Round about the year 1500, at the shrine of Loreto, Christians began to sing them in solemn worship, and that devotion soon spread throughout the world.

Each invocation is an aspiratory prayer that we affectionately address to Our Lady. Every one of them reflects a particular dimension of Our Lady’s magnificent soul. The phrases are ordered according to the principal Marian truths. These include her divine maternity, perpetual virginity, and mediation, her universal queenship, and her universal example of Christian living.

When we beseech the Holy Mother of God, we’re explicitly calling on her most intimate relationship to God. When we praise her as the Virgin of virgins, we lovingly recognize her full dedication to the Father’s plan of salvation. As we invoke the Mother of Christ, we emphasize her key role in the mission of Christ the mediator, savior, and king. By praising her as Queen and Mediatrix, we exult in the Lord’s kingship over all creation.

The initial phrases of the litany suggest her attributes in broad strokes, and the rest develop and expound upon these. The Virgin our Mother is the Holy Mother of God. This is the greatest title we can address her, since it is the basis for all the others. As the Mother of Christ, she’s rightly praised as the Mother of our Creator and the Mother of our Savior. She’s consequently the Mother of the Church and the Mother of Divine Grace.

We shower her with other loving reminders of her special qualities that follow naturally from these first ones: Mother most pure, Mother most chaste, Mother inviolate, Mother undefiled, Mother most amiable, and Mother most admirable.

Then we sing forth other notes of the harmonious chord of Mary’s most intimate union with God. These have to do with her perpetual virginity. She’s Virgin most prudent, Virgin most venerable, Virgin most renowned, Virgin most powerful, Virgin most merciful, and Virgin most faithful.

After invoking our Mother as a perfect example of all virtue, we continue to exalt her with further admiring salutations. We call on her as the Mirror of Justice, Seat of Wisdom, Cause of our Joy, Spiritual Vessel, Vessel of Honor, Singular Vessel of Devotion, Mystical Rose, Tower of David, Tower of Ivory, and House of Gold.

The Mother of God, says John Paul, continually exceeds her duty in our service as mediator between God and men through Christ. Three different symbols represent her universal mediation. She is the Ark of the New Covenant, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Gate of Heaven, since through her we reach God. We also beseech her as the Morning Star, who always helps us find our way in life. We often ask her intercession as the Health of the Sick, the Refuge of Sinners, the Comfort of the Afflicted, and the Help of Christians.

Finally, Mary is Queen of heaven and of earth, since she’s the Mother of the universal sovereign. In that broad spectrum of Christ’s heavenly kingdom, there are angels, saints, and holy souls who are striving for sanctity now in this life as wayfarers. We petition each one of them through our Mother, as the Queen who stands at the summit of all creation. She’s Queen of angels, Queen of patriarchs, Queen of prophets, Queen of apostles, Queen of martyrs, Queen of confessors, Queen of virgins, Queen of the family, and Queen of all saints.

The Litany of Loreto concludes with four further expressions of queenship. We hail Mary, Queen conceived without original sin, Queen assumed into heaven, Queen of the most holy rosary, and Queen of peace.

By pausing slowly to consider each one of these praises, we can marvel at the gifts God has bestowed on Our Lady. We’re filled with awe before the countless divine graces she’s adorned with. We are very fortunate to have such a Mother, constantly at our side. At times, we can use each individual aspiration of the litany as a prayer to remind her frequently of our love for her and our desire for her protection.

In the apostolic exhortation for the year of the rosary, John Paul II talks about how the rosary is a prayer that is simple, yet profound. He says it still remains at the dawn of this third millennium, a prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness. We are so many years and decades into the third millennium. We can find the words of the Holy Father have a great ring of truth about them.

He said it blends easily into the spiritual journey of the Christian life. John XXIII used to say that the worst rosary is the one that doesn’t get said. In other words, every rosary is a good rosary. We might be distracted, we might be like little children, our mind might be far away, but Our Lady loves to hear that music that’s coming out from our heart and soul. There can be car journey rosaries and bus journey rosaries and waiting in the queue for checkout in the supermarket rosaries, and all sorts of situations where we can get through a decade or two.

He said to proclaim Christ as the goal of human history and the point in which the desires of history and civilization turn is one of the goals of our life. He said the rosary, though clearly Marian in character, is at heart a Christocentric prayer. It leads us to Jesus. “Blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus” (cf. Luke 1:42). He says it has all the depth of the gospel message in its entirety, of which it can be said to be a compendium.

It is said that for Sister Lucia of Fatima, the rosary was never out of her hands. Likewise, John Paul II. The prelate of Opus Dei tells a story of how when Pope John Paul came to bless the first parish in Rome dedicated to St. Josemaria, it was a two or three hour ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, he accompanied him to the car. The Pope had been on his feet for almost three hours. When he sat into the car, the first thing he did was take out his rosary beads. The prelate of Opus Dei said, “What impressed me most in the whole ceremony was the piety of the Holy Father. He didn’t just sit into the car and say, ‘Turn on the air con quick and let me relax.’” Half an hour later, he had to be on the balcony of St. Peter’s. But he found his rest in Our Lady.

He says in that document, it’s an echo of the prayer of Mary, her perennial Magnificat for the work of the redemptive incarnation which began in her virginal womb. He said with the rosary, the Christian people sit at the school of Mary and are led to contemplate the beauty of the face of Christ and to experience the depth of his love. He said through the rosary, the faithful receive abundant grace, as though from the very hands of the Mother of the Redeemer. He said to recite the rosary is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ.

He said the rosary should be especially emphasized and promoted. It’s good to be aware that there are many people in the world who have never heard of the rosary. The very fact that we give an example of praying the rosary — we can do a great favor for people. Sister Lucia of Fatima used to say that we are reminded of God by simply taking hold of the beads.

John Paul says the rosary goes to the very heart of Christian life. It offers a familiar yet fruitful spiritual and educational opportunity for personal contemplation, the formation of the people of God, and the new evangelization. But the most important reason, he says, for strongly encouraging the practice of the rosary is that it represents a most effective means of fostering among the faithful that commitment to the contemplation of the Christian mystery.

As a genuine training in holiness, what’s needed is a Christian life distinguished above all by the art of prayer. He says families should become genuine schools of prayer. The rosary belongs among the finest and most praiseworthy traditions of Christian contemplation. It’s a typically meditative prayer, corresponding in some way to the prayer of the heart. It’s a prayer for peace and for the family.

For centuries, pilgrims with beads in hand would come from various walks of life, whole families and parishes to learn from Mary the love of Christ. In this way, they chose the best school because in meditating on the mysteries of the rosary, we see through her eyes the mystery of Our Lord’s life. His passion, death, and resurrection — we relive them as she lived them in her mother’s heart.

When we say the rosary, we speak to Mary. We constantly, confidently entrust to her all our concerns and sorrows, our joys and hopes. We ask her to help us to accept God’s plans and to obtain from her Son the necessary grace to carry them out faithfully. She — joyous, sorrowful, and glorious, always at her Son’s side — is at the same time present in the midst of our everyday problems.

Our Lady is the unsurpassable model of Christian contemplation, said Pope John Paul. From her Lord’s conception until his resurrection and ascension into heaven, his Mother kept the gaze of her immaculate heart fixed on her divine Son. A wondrous, penetrating, sorrowful, and radiant gaze. It is this Marian look, full of faith and love, that the individual Christian and the ecclesial community make their own when they recite the rosary.

This is why the Pope suggested the addition of a fourth cycle of mysteries of the rosary, the mysteries of light, which deal with Christ’s public life. As every genuine prayer, the rosary does not move us from reality, but helps us to live the latter interiorly united to Christ, giving witness to the love of God. John Paul also reminded the faithful that peace and the family are the two primary intentions in praying the rosary.

We can turn to Our Lady, Queen of the Rosary, and ask her that we might use this feast day to grow in our love of the rosary and make resolutions to be very generous with our rosaries throughout each day, obtaining many favors for the Holy Father, for the universal Church, and for the personal apostolate of each one of us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW