Our Lady of the Rosary

Our Lady of the Rosary at Gudja parish, Malta

October 7 is a special day for all devotees of the Rosary. The feast of Our Lady of the Rosary has an interesting history, since its name and its date were changed a few times over the decades. It all started with an apparition of the Blessed Mother to Saint Dominic in a church in Prouille, France in 1208. The ordinary people wanted a prayer they could say since the priests were able to read the 150 Psalms in Latin in their Breviary. So they started saying 150 Hail Maries. They became monotonous, so they divided them in 50, 50 and 50, reflecting on three mysteries, Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious.  Then each 50 were divided further into decades, using Rosary beads to count. Everything stayed the same until 2002 when Pope St John Paul II introduced the Luminous Mysteries to be said on Thursdays. Incidentally these were the same 5 mysteries that the first Maltese Saint George Preca had suggested to his students to pray, back in 1955.

After various plagues in the 13^th and 14^th centuries, the people had abandoned the recitation of the Rosary, until the Blessed Mother appeared to another Dominican, Blessed Alan de la Roche to encourage the devotion among the people. Then in 1571, Pope Pius V, himself a Dominican instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory to celebrate the victory of the Christians against the Turks at Lepanto, soon after the Great Siege of Malta, also against the Ottoman Empire.  Two years later, Pope Gregory XIII changed the name of the feast to ‘Feast of the Holy Rosary.’ Until 1716, the feast was always celebrated on the first Sunday in October, and in the 20th century, two further changes placed the feast as we know it nowadays. First it as Pope Pius X who assigned the feast for October 7^th each year, and then Pope Blessed Paul VI in 1969 changed the name to Our Lady of the Rosary.