Rosary

ROSARY. - It is the Marian prayer composed of 15 decades of Hail Marys interspersed with the Our Father and the Glory Be. To vocal prayer is added mental prayer, with the meditation of 15 Mysteries concerning the joys, sorrows and glories of Jesus and Mary. The Litany (v.) of Loreto is customarily added to the recitation of the Rosary.

The Rosary belongs to that luxuriant reflowering in new manifestations of devotion toward the Virgin, in its most popular and artless aspects, which is characteristic already toward the end of the 12th century; the Cistercians contributed to it greatly and then, from the beginning of the following century, the great Mendicant Orders in their strenuous struggles against heresies. Pious accounts of the time reliably inform us that in the 13th century it was customary to repeat often a sequence of 50 or 150 Hail Marys accompanied also by genuflections and often interspersed with the Our Father. The recitation in fact of the Our Father and the Creed had been repeatedly imposed on the faithful in earlier ages; subsequently that of the Angelic Salutation in its shorter form was also spread (v. AVE MARIA); thus alongside the recitation of the Davidic Psalter proper to monks, to friars and to devout persons of the more cultured classes, the people of simple burghers had the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin, which together with the Laudi spirituali was recited in the Companies and Confraternities. For easier and more diligent recitation the crown (v.) was adopted, which was already in use for similar devotions. Very soon the remembrance of the Mysteries of the life of Mary and of Jesus was introduced into this recitation; in this way its monotony was tempered and the basic points of the supernatural belief were called to mind. This remembrance was placed almost in the manner of an ejaculation as an addition to the Hail Mary, suitably altering it; or else it was made the object of a very brief consideration at the end of each decade, and thus there came about the series of the fifteen Mysteries distinguished into joyful, sorrowful and glorious. It is therefore a devotion originally of the people, yet constantly regulated by the spirit of the Church, and it acquired its consistency by degrees, within a time certainly not long. St. Dominic and his friars, popular preachers by mission, could not remain extraneous to this movement, but it is not easy to determine under what precise form they practiced and spread it at the beginning. An, one may say, official sanction came when St. Pius V made the formula of the Hail Mary fixed and uniform. The Confraternities of the Holy Rosary, already spread throughout all Christendom, maintained under the assistance of the Dominicans and enriched with indulgences, had a great part in keeping alive the love for the Rosary. Father Alan de Rupe (v.), a Dominican, had greatly contributed to their diffusion beyond the Alps.

Recently the recitation of the Rosary assumed new aspects such as the "perpetual Rosary", the "living Rosary", the "Rosary of children", the "Rosary of the sick". Among the popes who have patronized the devotion of the Rosary with Encyclicals or letters are remembered: Leo XIII (1883, 1891, 1895, 1896), Pius X (27 June 1908), Pius XI (1937), and Pius XII who on 15 Sept. 1951 sent to Christendom the encyclical Ingruentium malorum to implore from the Virgin the end of so many evils that afflict humanity.

Pio Paschini

FEAST OF THE ROSARY

Sacratissimi Rosarii B. Mariae V., double of the second class, 7 October.

The liturgical feast of the Rosary draws its origin from the grand victory of the Christian fleet over the Turks near Lepanto (7 October 1571), an event that at the time made an enormous impression on all Christendom (v. Pastor, VIII, p. 605 ff.). St. Pius V ascribed the victory to the intervention of the Madonna, invoked not only in Rome but throughout the Christian world, especially by means of the Rosary. Therefore the following year, on 17 March 1572, he instituted in perpetual remembrance the liturgical feast of the Commemoratio B. Mariae V. de Victoria, with simple rite and the common formulary of Marian feasts, without any mention of the Rosary. The piety of the faithful then grew accustomed to adding to the Litany of Loreto the invocation Auxilium Christianorum (Pastor, loc. cit.). Gregory XIII, with the bull Monet Apostolus (1 April 1573), instituted a liturgical feast proper to the Rosary, to be celebrated on the first Sunday of October with double rite; this feast was granted to the entire Dominican Order and to all churches and oratories where the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary was erected and which had their own altar sub invocatione B. Mariae V. Rosarii. He also promoted the solemn processions of the Holy Rosary on the evening of the first Sunday of October (famous was that of the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, in which even the popes often took part until about 1870), which were then celebrated throughout the Catholic world.

On the first centenary of the victory of Lepanto, Queen Maria of Spain obtained from Clement X, for all the countries of the Spanish Crown, the feast of the Rosary without the limitation imposed by Gregory XIII (26 September 1671). The Sacred Congregation of Rites then went on to grant this feast without the aforesaid limits to many other dioceses. Finally, following the grand victories over the Turks that succeeded one another from 1683 (siege of Vienna) until the battle of Peterwardein (5 August 1716) and the abandonment of the siege of Cyprus (22 August 1716, octave of the Assumption), Charles VI obtained from Clement XI (13 October of the same year) the extension of the feast of the Rosary to the whole Church, under the rite of double major. Benedict XIII added to it (10 and 19 March 1725) the historical lessons proper to the second Nocturn. The intense revival of devotion to the Rosary in the times of Leo XIII had its reflections also in the liturgy. The invocation Regina sacratissimi Rosarii was added to the Litany of Loreto (24 December 1883), the feast was raised to the rite of double of the second class (11 September 1887), and in 1888 (5 August) the Office and proper Mass of the Dominicans, granted to them since 1834, were extended to the whole Church, while nevertheless preserving the historical lessons of 1725.

In the general reorganization under the blessed Pius X (decree of 23 October 1913) the movable feast of the Rosary was fixed to the historical date of 7 October.

The primitive feast of S. Maria de Victoria, on the other hand, survived in various propers and in many places; famous was that in the church of the same name in Rome, where the venerable father Domenico di Gesù e Maria, Discalced Carmelite, deposited the image of the Madonna which he had carried in the battle of the White Mountain near Prague, on 8 November 1620, in which the Catholic League won a decisive victory over the Calvinist and Protestant side. The servant of God Bartolo Longo, founder of the sanctuary of Pompeii, propagated devotion to the Holy Rosary especially under the title of the Madonna "of Victories," precisely in remembrance of so many glorious deeds of Christian arms.

Giuseppe Löw

ICONOGRAPHY

Although some 14th-century depictions of the rosary crown have come down to us — such as, for example, the one at Dijon, where on the tomb of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, weeping figures holding rosaries are seen, or the one on the tomb slab of the Dauphin Humbert II (died 1353) in Paris, and the one on the tomb of the Count of Pieterkin (died 1366) in the Dominican church at Ghent — nevertheless the oldest Madonnas of the Rosary, conceived as altarpieces, date only from the end of the 15th century. As the earliest example of a definite iconographic model of the Madonna of the Rosary, the triptych painted in the Flamboyant Gothic taste in the church of St. Andrew in Cologne is recognized, datable precisely to 1474, the year in which Bl. Alan of the Rock founded the first confraternity of the Rosary. In this triptych, the Madonna, depicted in the center, holds the Child Jesus in her arms, and he offers a rosary to the family of the rosarians; on the side panels are large figures of St. Dominic and St. Peter Martyr, and below, along the whole triptych, in small proportions, are seen kneeling the Bishop of Cologne, the Emperor Frederick, the Empress Eleanor, various princes, as well as many religious and faithful, who all together form the family of the rosarians gathered around the Virgin. This model of sacred depiction soon spread through central Europe, as several popular woodcuts still from the late 15th century illustrate, if only in summary fashion, for example, the one of 1495 that adorns the German Psalter "Unser Lieben Frauen Psalter." In a painting, datable to 1520, formerly the property of the Rudolfinum in Prague, Albrecht Dürer however expressed a different concept of the Madonna of the Rosary, depicting the Child Jesus in the arms of the Madonna in the act of placing a crown of roses on the head of the Pope, while the Virgin places another on the head of the Emperor.

Italian art of the late 15th century and the dawn of the 16th century did not leave an abundance of complete depictions of the Madonna of the Rosary. From the late 15th century, the Madonna enthroned with the Child Jesus by Antonello da Messina, in the Museo Civico of Messina, is remembered, where a rosary is seen placed at the feet of the Virgin. Then in 1539 Lorenzo Lotto gives a splendid depicuration of the subject in the altarpiece of the church of St. Dominic at Cingoli (Marche). In this altarpiece, the fifteen Mysteries are represented in fifteen roundels, in the upper part of the altarpiece where angels hold baskets with rose petals, an allusion to the rosary, to scatter them before the throne of the Mother of God.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, altarpieces multiply that depict the Madonna with the Child Jesus in her arms, giving the rosary to St. Dominic, often assisted by other Dominican saints and sometimes surrounded by humble rosary faithful. As examples of this period one may cite: the altarpiece by Giorgio Vasari in S. Maria Novella in Florence, that of a follower of Tintoretto, now preserved in the Pinacoteca of Ferrara, and the one painted in its time for the Confraternity of the Rosary in S. Pietro Martire at Murano, a work of the workshop of Paolo Veronese, now at the Accademia in Venice. Imbued with an exquisite pathetic sentiment is the Madonna of the Rosary, painted between 1588 and 1591 by Barocci for the church of S. Rocco at Senigallia; in it one sees St. Dominic alone on earth, kneeling in ecstasy before the Madonna who gives the rosary, who, surrounded by angelic hierarchies, appears to him in the heavens with the Child Jesus.

In the seventeenth century some masterpieces have as their subject the Madonna of the Rosary. Among them the great painting by Caravaggio, painted in Naples in 1608, now preserved in the Gallery of Vienna. In it the Madonna appears to the family of the rosary faithful, to whom St. Dominic, in the presence of St. Peter Martyr, is distributing crowns. A second masterpiece is the altarpiece of the oratory of the Rosary in Palermo, painted by Anthony van Dyck in 1627 in Genoa. Of 1640 is the Madonna of the Rosary in the church of S. Sabina in Rome, a most graceful work of Sassoferrato, in which one sees at the sides of the Virgin's throne Sts. Dominic and Catherine of Siena, who receive the rosary from the Madonna and the Child Jesus. It should be noted that a similar iconographic conception of Sassoferrato comes very close to that of the venerated Madonna of Pompeii.

In a splendid decoration frescoed on the ceiling of the church of the Gesuiti in Venice, G. B. Tiepolo left a grandiose eighteenth-century composition, where one sees the Madonna with the Child Jesus in heaven, St. Dominic and, below, groups of rosary faithful.

At times there have also been seen depictions of the Madonna with the Child Jesus in her arms holding out a rosary, without any other figure intervening in the picture. Such a simple model of the Madonna of the Rosary implies that the crown is offered to all those who are gathered in prayer before the sacred image; an example of this simple model is provided by the modern painting by Niccolò Barabino in the church of the Immacolata in Genoa. - See plate LXXXIII.

Witold Wehr