The celebration began as a thanksgiving. After the naval battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, which was fought while rosary confraternities across Europe prayed, Pope Saint Pius V established a commemoration of Our Lady of Victory. Pope Gregory XIII renamed it the feast of the Most Holy Rosary and attached it to the first Sunday of October, and in 1716 Pope Clement XI extended it to the whole Church. Saint Pius X fixed it again on October 7, and the reformed calendar keeps it there as an obligatory memorial. The Rosary itself grew slowly out of the monastic practice of praying the one hundred fifty psalms; lay people and those who could not read substituted one hundred fifty Hail Marys, divided into groups and joined to meditation on events in the life of Christ. Tradition associates its spread with Saint Dominic and the Order of Preachers, and the Dominicans have been its chief promoters ever since. Saint John Paul II proposed the five luminous mysteries in the apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae of 2002, giving the prayer a fuller sweep from the Baptism of the Lord to the institution of the Eucharist. The Mass is celebrated in white; the Gospel offered is the Annunciation, the scene from which the Hail Mary itself is drawn. Because of this memorial the whole of October is widely kept as the month of the Rosary, a devotion Pope Leo XIII urged in a long series of encyclicals. The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy describes the Rosary as an essentially contemplative prayer, warns against a merely mechanical recitation, and asks that it never be prayed during the celebration of Mass, since the liturgy and popular devotion each have their own proper place.

Memorial

memorial

Ordinary time

October 7

memorial