Feast of the Holy Rosary - October 7

Below is a column written by Father George Rutler, pastor of the Church of St. Michael in New York City, on the Holy Rosary and the role it played in the victory of Pope St. Pius’ alliance naval forces against the Islamic Ottomans as well as its use in today’s world. 

The rosary has been the weapon of choice for Catholics around the world for centuries to fight the forces of evil so prevalent, both in the past and in the present.  

By Father George W. Rutler, Pastor

Church of St. Michael, NYC

Feasts are reminders that we are invited to the eternal Feast in Heaven. October 7 is the Feast of the Holy Rosary, instituted to celebrate the victory of Pope St. Pius’ alliance of naval forces against the Islamic Ottomans. Even some English Protestants joined the effort in realization that everything Christianity had given us was at stake. The Pope attributed the victory of the sea battle at Lepanto to the prayers of the Rosary. Had events gone otherwise, our world would be bereft of respect for human life, universities, plastic and musical arts, the sacredness of marriage, the equality of women, and the use of reason.

These gifts of Christian culture are vanishing today by default of nominal Christians who have abandoned the faith that shaped their culture. Our cultural struggle is wider and longer than Lepanto. Young men preparing for the priesthood now are enlisting in history’s greatest spiritual struggle. Happily, more men are now enrolled in seminaries in the United States than in nearly two decades: a sixteen percent increase since 1995 and ten per cent more than in 2005. As priests, they will support the faithful laity as the faithful support them.

Attacks on Christianity are drawn in blood in places like Pakistan, Syria and Nigeria. We may be blindsided if we think the dangers are any less in our own country now. The enemy uses cynicism and social pressure rather than weapons of steel.

The prayers of Our Lady are our great defense. Pope Francis’ formal announcement in sonorous Latin that the popes John XXIII and John Paul II will be canonized as saints next April, affirms their desire that we enlist the Rosary in the crusade against Satan and all his evil works. In 1961 John XXIII signed the Apostolic Letter Il Religioso Convegno, along with his personal meditations on the mysteries of the Rosary, which he perpetually recited in between the duties of his daily schedule. In 2002, John Paul II signed the Apostolic Letter on the Rosary, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, as his favorite prayer and gave us the Luminous Mysteries to guide us in the darkness of these new days.

Our Lord warned against the vain repetitions of the Pharisees, who thought that the number of prayers apart from the devotion of the will could bend the ear of God. But vain repetition does not invalidate repetition altogether: the repetitious breathing of the lungs and beating of the heart give physical life; so too does the repeating of the words of Gabriel, Elizabeth, and Our Lord’s own prayer open the gates of eternity. We often bury our beloved dead with Rosaries. My own mother had in her hands a Rosary that John Paul II had given her. But we who are alive must make the Rosary a living prayer, and by so praying we may live forever.

Feast of the Epiphany

by Fr. George W. Rutler

The Twelve Days of Christmas end with the celebration of the visit of the Wise Men to the Holy Child. This “Epiphany” is the showing of Christ to those who were foreign to Judaism. Very little is said of the Wise Men, and we cannot even be sure that there were just three. It may have taken them upwards of two years to make the journey, and given their familiarity with the Jewish scriptures and astronomy they probably were Zoroastrians, monotheists who were open to thewisdom and writings of other religions. They would have been wealthy and influential in a culture that esteemed high learning. Theycertainly were wise in being able to detect the cunning of King Herod. Their saga is so exotic that it is the very stuff of romance, which makes it difficult to believe that they really existed. Yet they were very much a part of the nativity narrative and were the first to take the unwritten Gospel to distant places.

In “The Journey of the Magi,” T. S. Eliot portrays them as utterly changed by what they saw and more than uncomfortable with their homeland — present-day Iran — when they went back: "We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death."

All lives that truly encounter Christ are changed. The sublime and most potent examples of that are the saints, heirs of the Wise Men. Pope Benedict XVI canonized some of them this past year as models for what he has called the New Evangelization.

Father Jacques Berthieu, who died in 1896 at age 57, was a French Jesuit missionary martyred in Madagascar. Pedro Calungsod, who died in 1672 at 17, was a Filipino lay catechist martyred in Guam.

Father Giovanni Piamarta, an Italian priest who died in 1913 at 71, counted among his works the establishment of technical training schools for disadvantaged youths.

Marianne Cope, who died in 1918 at age 80, had come from her native Germany to upstate New York and, as a Franciscan nun, worked among the lepers in Hawaii with St. Damian.


 Kateri Tekakwitha was an Algonquin-Mohawk who suffered much for the Faith she embraced and died in 1680 at the age of 24. Anna Schäffer, who died in 1925, spent over half of her 43 years in her Bavarian home as an invalid with mystical gifts as a visionary and miracle worker.

Like the Magi, these saints were never able to call their old home their true home, for they set their sights on their promised home in Heaven, and that hope made them all the more useful in this world. “Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).