The Holy Rosary

1. The Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38)
2. The Visitation (Luke 1:39–56)
3. The Nativity (Luke 2:1–20)
4. The Presentation in the Temple (Luke 2:22–40)
5. The Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple (Luke 2:41–52)

1. The Agony in the Garden (Matthew 26:36–46)
2. The Scourging at the Pillar (John 19:1)
3. The Crowning with Thorns (Matthew 27:27–31)
4. The Carrying of the Cross (John 19:17)
5. The Crucifixion (John 19:18–30)

1. The Resurrection (Matthew 28:1–10)
2. The Ascension (Acts 1:9–11)
3. The Descent of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1–4)
4. The Assumption of Mary (cf. Revelation 12:1)
5. The Coronation of Mary (cf. Revelation 12:1–6)

1. The Baptism in the Jordan (Matthew 3:13–17)
2. The Wedding at Cana (John 2:1–11)
3. The Proclamation of the Kingdom (Mark 1:14–15)
4. The Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8)
5. The Institution of the Eucharist (Matthew 26:26–28)

The Rosary opens with the Apostles' Creed, the ancient baptismal creed of Rome. How it relates to the Creed of Nicaea is explained on the Nicene Creed vs Apostles' Creed page.

On 12 September 1213, at Muret near Toulouse, a small crusader force under Simon de Montfort, put by the chroniclers at fewer than a thousand knights and sergeants, faced the combined army of King Peter II of Aragon and the Count of Toulouse. The medieval chronicles claim the allied host numbered in the tens of thousands; modern historians think those figures inflated, but agree the crusaders were heavily outnumbered. St Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers, was in Muret, and Dominican tradition holds that he led the faithful in prayer in the church while the knights charged. The result astonished contemporaries: the allied army was routed, King Peter was killed, and the chroniclers claimed the crusaders' losses were almost nothing. The Rosary as a formal devotion took shape in the centuries after Dominic, but Dominican tradition has always remembered Muret as its first victory, the seed of everything that followed.

Three years after conquering Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II turned his armies against Belgrade, the last great fortress guarding Central Europe. Pope Callixtus III called all Christendom to prayer and ordered church bells rung at midday to summon the faithful to it. In July 1456 the defenders under John Hunyadi, joined by a ragged army of peasant crusaders preached into being by the seventy-year-old Franciscan St John of Capistrano, who carried a crucifix rather than a sword, shattered the siege. Mehmed himself was wounded and withdrew. The midday bell that still rings from Catholic churches is popularly linked to that summons to prayer, a daily echo of Belgrade.

The defining case, told in full above: Pius V called Christendom to the Rosary as the Ottoman armada advanced, contemporary accounts describe the wind turning at the critical hour, the fleet that had dominated the Mediterranean was destroyed, and some 12,000 to 15,000 Christian galley slaves were freed. The feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, 7 October, was instituted so the world would not forget.

In 1683 the Ottoman Empire launched its greatest land invasion of Europe: an army estimated by historians at anywhere from 90,000 to 170,000 men besieged Vienna, the gateway to the German lands. The city was starving and its walls were breached. Blessed Pope Innocent XI called for prayer, and Rosary processions were held across Europe. King Jan III Sobieski of Poland arrived with the relief force and heard Mass on the Kahlenberg heights before the battle; accounts record that he served the Mass himself. On 12 September he led some 18,000 horsemen, including his winged hussars, down from the heights in what is often described as the largest cavalry charge in history. The Ottoman army broke. Sobieski's message to the Pope consciously corrected Caesar: “Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit”, “We came, we saw, God conquered.” In thanksgiving, Innocent XI extended the feast of the Holy Name of Mary, kept on the anniversary, to the whole Church.

Through 1917 the Blessed Virgin appeared to three shepherd children at Fatima, identifying herself as “the Lady of the Rosary” and asking that the Rosary be prayed daily for peace. For the final apparition on 13 October a crowd variously estimated at 30,000 to 70,000 gathered in the rain, and it included hostile journalists and sceptics who had come to see the promised sign fail. What they reported instead has become known as the Miracle of the Sun: the sun appearing to spin, change colour and plunge toward the earth. The phenomenon was described by believers, by sceptics and by the press alike, including the anticlerical Lisbon daily O Século, whose editor Avelino de Almeida published his own eyewitness account. Witnesses reported the drenched crowd and ground drying rapidly, and some described seeing the phenomenon from kilometres away. The Church approved the apparitions in 1930. The message was simple: “Pray the Rosary every day to obtain peace for the world.”

When the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, eight Jesuits were in their church house roughly a kilometre from the hypocentre, about eight city blocks, inside the radius in which almost everything was destroyed and tens of thousands died at once; by the end of 1945 the death toll is generally estimated at between 90,000 and 140,000. The eight survived. The Jesuits themselves attributed their survival to the Mother of God: Fr Hubert Schiffer, one of the eight, gave the same answer for the rest of his life, “We were living the message of Fatima. We prayed the Rosary every day,” and maintained that the doctors who repeatedly examined them found no lasting radiation effects. Their survival has never been given a full natural explanation; the Jesuits were content with the supernatural one.

After the Second World War, Soviet troops occupied eastern Austria, and year after year negotiations for their withdrawal went nowhere. In 1947 the Franciscan Fr Petrus Pavlicek, after praying at the shrine of Mariazell where he understood himself to receive the words “Do as I say and there will be peace”, founded the Rosary Atonement Crusade. By the mid-1950s it counted around 700,000 members, roughly one Austrian in ten, praying the Rosary daily for the country's freedom, with Chancellor Julius Raab among them. In April 1955 Moscow suddenly agreed to terms, and on 15 May 1955 the Austrian State Treaty was signed; by October the last Soviet soldiers were gone. A voluntary, peaceful Soviet withdrawal from occupied European territory was without parallel in that era, and those who had prayed for eight years drew the obvious conclusion. Raab publicly gave thanks to God for the nation's freedom.

In February 1986, when the Marcos regime sent tanks and troops against the People Power Revolution, Cardinal Jaime Sin broadcast an appeal over Radio Veritas calling the Filipino people into the streets, armed with nothing but Rosaries. Crowds estimated at well over a million, with some estimates of two million, knelt on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in the path of the armoured columns, praying the Rosary aloud. Soldiers ordered to fire refused; tank crews shut down their engines; helicopter pilots defected. The dictatorship fell in four days, almost without bloodshed from the crowds, in what is remembered as one of the great peaceful revolutions of the twentieth century. A shrine to Our Lady of EDSA now stands where the tanks stopped.