By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
Part 2
The previous article looked at aspects of the growth of Marian devotion in the Church up to the Middle Ages, and now we will look at how the rosary developed though the work of St. Dominic — and how big an impact this had in overthrowing the Albigensian heresy, which, if it had prevailed, would have destroyed medieval society.
The first definite evidence for the promotion of what corresponds to the modern rosary is found in the second half of the 14th century, in the work of Blessed Alan de la Roche and his fellow Dominicans; traditionally though, this devotion goes back to the time of St. Dominic himself or even earlier. According to him, Dominic had revived the practice of saying the rosary in response to revelations from Mary, while engaged in his fight against the Albigensians, as a means of winning them back to the Church.
Albigensianism represented a revival of Gnostic ideas, present as an undercurrent within the religious mentality of Christendom. The Albigensians rejected the sacraments as well as many basic Christian principles, including the resurrection of the body, and adopted an extremely rigorous form of life that condemned marriage, while they also favored a form of suicide by starvation.
These ideas were considered a clear threat not only by the Church but also by society as a whole, and were condemned by numerous Church councils. Despite this the movement grew rapidly and missionaries, including St. Dominic, were sent to convert them, and his work played an important part in the defeat of Albigensianism.
Dominic’s part in the development of the rosary has been disputed, but there is no question that there has been a longstanding tradition in the Church that regards this particular form of meditative prayer as the best form of devotion to our Lady, and hence ultimately to God, since prayer to Mary is not an end in itself, but leads to Christ. In fact, with only a couple of exceptions, all the Popes from the late 15th century to the present have acclaimed the rosary with its mixture of vocal and mental prayer.
It seems that there is a definite tradition within the Dominican order linking the founder to the propagation of the rosary, and that possibly Dominic may have preached sermons on the basics of the faith and interspersed these with “Hail Marys,” thus initiating the idea of “meditating” on the mysteries surrounding the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus.
In essence, we can say that the rosary is a prayerful scriptural meditation, since the Our Father is Jesus’ own prayer given to His disciples when they asked Him how they should pray (Matt. 6:9-13), while the first part of the Hail Mary is also scriptural, being a compilation of part of the dialogue between Mary and the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation (Luke 1:28), combined with the exclamation made by Elizabeth during the Visitation (Luke 1:42). The prayer was originally known as the “angelic salutation” (greeting), and seems to possibly date from the fourth or fifth centuries, also being present in Eastern liturgical works.
The second part of the Hail Mary, the intercessory prayer to Mary, seems to date from about the 11th century, or possibly even earlier, and was gradually adopted by the Church, with the whole prayer being finally fixed in its present form in the 16th century.
The rosary is not just a pious practice though, and there have been a number of important historical incidents in which the praying of the rosary, and, more generally, devotion to our Lady, has played a crucial part, including the Battle of Lepanto. This took place on October 7, 1571, when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of southern European Catholic states, fought against the main fleet of the Muslim Ottoman Empire near Lepanto, off western Greece.
The Pope, Pius V, called for Catholics to pray the rosary for success, and the Holy League did indeed win a decisive victory which prevented the invasion of Europe. At the moment of victory, Pius V, who was many hundreds of miles away at the Vatican, in a meeting, got up, went over to a window, and exclaimed: “The Christian fleet is victorious!” Out of this victory came the “Feast of the Holy Rosary,” celebrated each year on October 7.
The power of the rosary was also dramatically shown in 1955, when the occupying Soviet Army voluntarily left the eastern zone of Austria, which as an ally of Germany during the war, had, like Germany, been split up into four zones. Fr. Petrus Pavlicek, a Franciscan, had organized a Rosary Crusade from 1946 onward in the country, which eventually had ten percent of the population praying five decades of the rosary daily for peace. He also organized candlelit processions in Vienna with a Pilgrim Virgin statue of Our Lady from Fatima.
On May 13, 1955, the Fatima anniversary day, it was announced that the Soviets were willing to withdraw from Austria and sign a peace treaty. This was the only time in the history of the Soviet Union — prior to the changes in the 1980s following the collegial consecration made by Pope John Paul II in 1984 — that the Red Army voluntarily withdrew from a country it had occupied, and without firing a shot. In contrast, the attempted revolutions in Hungary, in 1956, and Czechoslovakia, in 1968, were brutally put down by Soviet tanks.
Apart from such historical incidents, though, we could also mention some of the saints who have had a great devotion to our Lady and who have done so much to spread the faith. This includes such great figures in the early Church as St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Cyril of Alexandria, and St. Ambrose, while in the Middle Ages, St. Bernard of Clairvaux was an outstanding devotee of our Lady, and the main force behind the incredible expansion of the Cistercian order.
St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) and St. John Eudes (1601-1680) also did a great deal to promote devotion to our Lady, while more recently, St. Louis de Montfort and St. Maximilian Kolbe exhibited outstanding devotion to the Blessed Virgin. And the above names are by no means an exhaustive list, and many more could be added.
Guadalupe And Lourdes
We can see, too, how our Lady has particularly intervened in world and Church history, from the post-Reformation period. It is from this point on that the most important early modern Marian apparitions took place, starting with Guadalupe in Mexico in 1531, and then at the Rue du Bac in Paris in 1830, and then in France again at La Salette in 1846, followed by Lourdes in 1858.
Imagine what Catholic life would have been like without those interventions. Imagine no Guadalupe and the millions of conversions that it prompted, thus changing the whole course of Mexican and indeed North and South American history. Or imagine if there had been no Miraculous Medal, the sacramental which came out of the Rue du Bac Apparitions to St. Catherine Labouré. Or no apparitions to St. Bernadette at Lourdes and the numerous miraculous cures at the Grotto.
The next article will look at how these Marian interventions, and particularly Fatima, were of such vital importance for the evangelizing work of the Church in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian Apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk.)
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