History of the Holy Rosary

Since the expulsion from Heaven of Lucifer and the other fallen angels — an event antecedent to
Adam’s creation — the Blessed Mother of God has been the razor by which the good are divided from
the bad, the children of God from the children of the devil.

In The Secret of the Rosary , St. Louis Marie de Montfort (1673-1716) wrote that it is the “sign” by which
the elect can be distinguished from the reprobate. He based his view on Our Lady’s revelation to Bl. Alan
de la Roche (d. 1475) and his own experience as a missionary in France. “I do not know,” he says, “nor
do I see clearly, how it can be that a devotion which seems so small can be the infallible sign of eternal
salvation and how its absence can be the sign of God’s eternal displeasure; nevertheless, nothing could
possibly be more true.”

Some understanding of why it should be so can be drawn from the curse God placed on the Evil One, the
Serpent, after Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden: “I will put enmities between thee
and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her
heel” (Genesis 3:15).

If the “enmities” promised by God are bound to produce conflict, a conflict destined to last until the end
of time, there are but two sides to it. If we want to be on God’s side, we must be the seed of the
Woman, our only alternative being to live as seed of the Old Serpent.

But who is the Woman who will crush Satan’s head? Who else can it be but the Sinless One hailed as
“full of grace” and “blessed among women” (Luke 1:28), Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus Christ, who is
also our Spiritual Mother, given to us by her Son before He died on the Cross (John 19: 26-27)?

There has always been, and always will be, enmity between the children of the devil and the children of
Mary. The devil’s spawn will never cease to attack Mary’s spiritual children, and the latter will be wise
always to defend themselves with the most powerful weapons possible, including the Our Father and
Hail Mary.1 Composed as it is of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, if the Rosary is positively hated or despised
by anyone, that person shows himself to be an enemy of God and therefore bound for Hell if he fails to
correct his ways. Even to neglect the regular recitation of the Rosary is at least foolhardy, if not actually
dangerous. This is why numerous canonized saints have seen devotion to the Rosary, or the lack of it, as
revelatory of the state of a person’s interior life.

In Christianity, monks and hermits of the earliest years would gather pebbles and then toss them away,
one by one, as they said each prayer or made each genuflection or Sign of the Cross. Later, strings of
beads, berries, bone discs, pebbles or knots were employed. The very word “bead” reflects this. It is
derived from the Old English word for prayer.

The rosary has roots in several early Christian prayer traditions. They share similar formats to the rosary
with repetitive structures and prayers.

Third-century Christian hermits and monks in Egypt (known as Desert Fathers) used stones and later
prayer ropes to keep track when praying the 150 Psalms.

Various forms of “the Jesus Prayer” (such as “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”)
became popular. The short prayer was said over and over again in a type of mantra while counting
beads.

The Our Father was also prayed 150 times, using a string of beads with five decades referred to as a
Paternoster (Latin for “Our Father”)

This Oriental form of rosary is known in the Hellenic Greek Church as kombologion (chaplet),
or komboschoinion (string of knots or beads), in the Russian Church as vervitza (string), chotki (chaplet),
or liestovka (ladder), and in the Rumanian Church as matanie (reverence). The first use of the rosary in
any general way was among the monks of the Orient.” (The notion of prayer beads being the “spiritual
sword” of the Eastern monk is reflected in Western practice. That is insofar as Western monks and friars
who wear some form of the Rosary on their habit generally wear it hanging from their waist on the left
side — the same side where gentlemen were once accustomed to wearing their swords.)

An early stage in the development of the Rosary in the West was the recitation by monks of the Psalms
of David. The monks would recite them in groupings of 50, 100, or all 150. Since most lay brothers could
not read, they would say the Our Father instead. An example of this is given in the Ancient Customs of
Cluny compiled by Udalrio in 1096. One of the customs required lay brothers to recite 50 Our Fathers for
the deceased of the order. In the 12th century, the Knights Templar were saying 150 Our Fathers a day
for a week when one of their own died. Not surprisingly, when the practice of reciting many Our Fathers
spread to laypersons, they came to call the strings of beads on which they counted the prayers
“Paternosters.”

When the Hail Mary came into more popular use, it and the Our Father were said the same number of
times. We can readily understand why. As voiced by the Archangel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin Mary
when she was asked to become the Mother of God, it is a salutation. Even as reigning royalty is still
saluted today by the repeated firing of cannons or honor is paid to individuals with cheers and applause,
and more honor given with additional cheers or longer applause, so it was fitting to repeat the Hail Mary
many times in order to honor the Queen of Heaven. That in fulfillment of her own prophecy that “all
generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48).
Of this, then, did the Rosary in rudimentary form consist: common prayers, known and loved by the
faithful, recited while being counted on beads.

St. Dominic

Some scholars and others may object to the history of the Rosary as related by Bl. Alan de la
Roche. Believing that the modern trend to “de-mythologize” virtually every aspect of the Faith
has led to an unhealthy spirit of skepticism, we choose to present what is reported by Bl. Alan —
that St. Dominic received directly from Our Lady the Rosary as the faithful have known it ever
since. We do so, first, because many popes, following the account given by Bl. Alan, have
spoken of the Rosary coming to us from Our Lady, through St. Dominic. Further, although the
earliest biographies of St. Dominic apparently say nothing about the origin of the Rosary as
related by Bl. Alan, the latter attested under oath that the knowledge came to him through a
mystical revelation.

As for it being Our Lady who gave us the Rosary, through St. Dominic, when Innocent III was
elected pope in 1198, Christendom was under threat. The new pope faced many problems, but
the one that caused him the most concern was the rapidly spreading Albigensian heresy,
introduced from the East and now well established in southern France.

Preaching in the daytime and praying and doing penance for the sins of the wayward at night, St.
Dominic labored for 10 years to bring the heretics back to the One True Faith. At first, he made
little headway. It was obvious that the enormity of their sins were blinding many to the Truth. So
it happened that at some point in 1214 he withdrew into a forest near Toulouse for nothing but to
pray and do penance for three days and nights. He prayed especially hard to Our Lady to
enlighten him as to what to do in order to bring the heretics to her Divine Son.

Lepanto

From their rise at the beginning of the 7th century, the Mohammedans sought to spread their false
religion by means of the sword. The “Scourge of God,” as they were called, poured out of the
Arabian Peninsula and within a matter of years subjugated the Holy Land, Persia, Iraq, and North
Africa — all of the lands of the Middle East that were Christian, or nearly so. From Africa, they
conquered Iberia. Spain would not finally rid herself of this alien occupation until 1492.
Unfortunately, great as was that triumph in the West, the Mohammedans had won their most
momentous victory in the East 39 years before. That was when the capital of the once mighty
Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, fell to the forces of Sultan Mohammed II in 1453. With its
fall, Europe was open to attack from the East.

Europe was vulnerable. The rise of nationalism and internal strife, especially after the Protestant
Revolt at the beginning of the 1500s, made her so. It was far from being a mere empty boast
when the Sultan declared that he would top St. Peter’s in Rome with the Crescent and wrap the
pope’s head in a turban.
St. Pius V, who became pope in 1566, sought to rally Europe’s rulers to the defense of the Continent.
Most were either involved in military ventures of their own or simply uninterested in helping the pope,
ignoring that they were as much threatened as the rest of Christendom by the Mohammedan menace.
Finally, the pope was able to gather a navy of ships from Venice, Spain, Genoa and smaller Italian states,
the Knights of Malta and his own Holy See. Don Juan of Austria, a natural son of the Emperor Charles V,
was named commander-in-chief of the force, which the pope placed under the protection of Our Lady,
Queen of the Most Holy Rosary. (In 1569, St. Pius, who spent the greater part of his pontificate
combating Protestantism, had declared in his Bull Consueverunt that the Rosary was the most effective
means of fighting heresy.)

The enemies met off Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth at dawn on October 7, 1571. The Turks sounded as if
they were straight from Hell with their shrieks and wild yells. The Christians maintained a general,
dignified silence that mirrored their determination. When the battle ended at about 5 o’clock in the
afternoon, no more than 45 Turkish ships were left afloat or uncaptured out of a fleet of 274. The
Christians, who had a smaller fleet to begin with, lost 12 galleys.

St. Louis de Montfort

His preaching bore much fruit, but his success also provoked the hostility of many bishops.

Why would a saint reconciling sinners, building shrines, and reviving the faith of entire towns
and cities end by being hated?

The answer is one word: Jansenism. Numerous members of the French hierarchy were polluted
with it at that time. Something like Calvinism, this heresy reduced Christianity to a cold, rigid
routine that ignored the love God feels for His sons and daughters. Devotions were condemned.
Our Lady, the angels and saints were cast into obscurity. It was in answer to this heresy that
Jesus Christ appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1675 to establish devotion to His Sacred
Heart.

St. Louis Marie also fought Jansenism. He did so by awakening in the hearts of the faithful a
love for the Mother of God and her Rosary. For, as he said: “As long as priests followed Saint
Dominic’s example and preached devotion to the Holy Rosary, piety and fervor thrived
throughout the Christian world and in those religious orders which were devoted to the Rosary.
But since people have neglected this gift from heaven, all kinds of sin and disorder have spread
far and wide.”14

FaTIMA
In 1917 Our Lady appeared six times to three shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal. The
children were: Lucia de Jesus dos Santos (age 10) and her cousins, Francisco (9) and Jacinta (7)
Marto, the latter two were made beati of the Church this year (2000). The first apparition was on
May 13, at which time Our Lady asked the children to return every month, on the same day,
through October. She would again appear to them on each occasion. At the apparition on
October 13 God worked one of the most spectacular miracles in history to confirm these visits
were from Heaven.19

The reason Our Blessed Mother appeared at Fatima was to tell us what we must do in order to
have peace. World War I was raging at the time, and Pope Benedict XV, after all diplomacy had
failed, begged the Queen of Peace to come to the aid of mankind. She appeared at Fatima for the
first time 45 days after he made his petition.

Her message, simply put: pray the Rosary every day , do penance, and have devotion to her
Immaculate Heart. She also had a message for the pope: that he was to consecrate Russia to her
Immaculate Heart. In this regard, she said: “If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted,
and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and
persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer,
various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy
Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be
granted to the world.”

If we want peace, we must pray the Rosary. This is what Lucia, now Sr. Maria Lucia of the
Immaculate Heart, a Carmelite nun, has said about the Rosary: “People must recite the Rosary
every day. Our Lady repeated this in all Her apparitions, as if to arm us in advance against these
times of diabolical disorientation, so that we would not let ourselves be fooled by false doctrines,
and that through prayer, the elevation of our soul to God would not be diminished.”22 In 1957 she
said, “The Most Holy Virgin, in these last times in which we live, has given a new efficacy to the
recitation of the Rosary to such an extent that there is no problem, no matter how difficult it is,
temporal or especially spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us, of our families, of the
families of the world, or of the religious communities, or even of the life of peoples and nations,
that cannot be solved by the Rosary. There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is,
that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary. With the Holy Rosary we will save
ourselves. We will sanctify ourselves. We will console Our Lord and obtain the salvation of
many souls.”

Thus we have the answer for our times and the fulfillment, it seems, of the prophecy Our Lady
made to St. Dominic so many centuries ago: “One day through the Rosary and the Scapular I will
save the world.” For now she comes, not simply to save23 one sinner, or to convert a nation or win
a war, but to tell us the solution to the problems of the entire world! When enough Catholics do
as Our Lady has asked, the pope will have the grace to do as God has commanded, through the
Most Holy Virgin Mary.
Some persons think that the Rosary is not for our “enlightened age.” The Lady of the Rosary —
that is how she introduced herself at Fatima — has declared otherwise. If we want to have peace,
if we want to gain Heaven, if we want to help save souls, let us set about obeying our dear
Mother, the Queen of the Most Holy Rosary!