ROSARY. - It is the Marian prayer composed of 15 decades of Hail Marys interspersed with the Our Father and the Glory Be. To the vocal prayer is added mental prayer, with the meditation of 15 Mysteries concerning the joys, sorrows, and glories of Jesus and Mary. The Litany of Loreto (v.) is commonly added to the recitation of the Rosary.
The Rosary fits into that flourishing revival of new forms of devotion to the Virgin, in its most popular and naive aspects, which is already characteristic toward the end of the 12th century; the Cistercians contributed greatly to this, and then, from the beginning of the following century, the great mendicant orders in their strenuous struggles against heresies. Pious accounts of the time confidently report 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. Indeed, the recitation of the Our Father and the Creed had been repeatedly imposed on the faithful in previous ages; later, the recitation of the Angelic Salutation in its shortest form was also spread (v. AVE MARIA); thus alongside the recitation of the Psalter, proper to monks, of
ROSARY — German woodcut of 1515.
1351
ROSARY
(1st. Anderson)
ROSARY — A resurrected man helping two companions to ascend to Paradise by offering them the Rosary. Detail from The Last Judgment by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel (1536-41).
pp. 236 ff., 511 ff.; D. Mozart, Etude sur les origines du Rosaire, Lyon 1911; L. Fanfani, De R. B. M. V.: hist. legal, exercitia, Turin 1930; M.-M. Gorce, Le Rosaire et ses antécédents histor., Paris 1931; id., Rosaire, in DTHC, XIII, 11, cols. 2902-11; F. D. Joret, Le Rosaire, Juvisy 1934; D. Zago, Il R., Turin 1948; F. M. William, L'hist. du Rosaire (transl. from German), Mulhouse 1949 (review by St. Orlandi, in Mem. domenic., new series, 25 [1949], pp. 278-84). See also Enc. Cat., VIII, col. 101.
FEAST OF THE ROSARY. — Sacratissimi Rosarii B. Mariae V., double of the 2nd class, October 7.
The liturgical feast of the Rosary has its origin in the great victory of the Christian fleet over the Turks near Lepanto (October 7, 1571), an event that at the time greatly impressed all Christendom (v. PASTORE, VIII, p. 65 ff). St. Pius V attributed the victory to the intervention of the Madonna, invoked not only in Rome but throughout the Christian world especially through the Rosary. Therefore, the following year, March 17, 1572, he instituted in perpetuity the liturgical feast of the Commemoratio B. Mariae V. Victoria, with a simple rite and the common formulary of Marian feasts, without any mention of the Rosary. The piety of the faithful then became accustomed to adding in the Litany of Loreto the invocation Auxilium Christianorum (Pastor, loc. cit.). Gregory XIII, with the bull Monet Apostolus (April 1, 1573), instituted a proper liturgical feast of the Rosary, to be celebrated on the first Sunday of October with a 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 established and which had an altar dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of the Holy Rosary. He also promoted solemn processions of the Holy Rosary on the evening of the first Sunday of October (famous was that of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, which often saw the participation of the popes until around 1870), which were then celebrated throughout the Catholic world.
In 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 (September 26, 1671). The Sacred Congregation of Rites then continued to grant this feast without the aforementioned limits to many other dioceses. Finally, following the great victories over the Turks that followed from 1683 (siege of Vienna) to the battle of Peterwardein (August 5, 1716) and the abandonment of the siege of Cyprus (August 22, 1716, octave of the Assumption), Charles VI obtained from Clement XI (October 13 of the same year) the extension of the feast of the Rosary to the entire Church, under the rite of a major double. Benedict XIII added (March 10 and 19, 1725) the historical lessons proper to the second Nocturn. The intense revival of devotion to the Rosary in the time of Leo XIII also had its reflections in the liturgy. The invocation Regina sacratissimi Rosarii was added to the Litany of Loreto (December 24, 1883), the feast was elevated to the rite of a double of the 2nd class (September 11, 1887), and in 1888 (August 5) the Office and Mass proper to the Dominicans, granted to them since 1834, were extended to the entire Church, while retaining the historical lessons of 1725.
In the general reorganization under Bl. Pius X (decree of October 23, 1913), the movable feast of the Rosary was fixed to the historical date of October 7.
The original feast of Santa Maria de Victoria survived in various proper texts and in many places; notable is that in the homonymous church in Rome, where the Venerable Fr. Domenico di Gesù e Maria, a Discalced Carmelite, deposited the image of the Madonna that he had carried in the battle of the White Mountain near Prague on November 8, 1620, in which the Catholic League achieved a decisive victory over the Calvinist and Protestant side. The Servant of God Bartolo Longo, founder of the sanctuary of Pompei, promoted devotion to the Holy Rosary especially under the title of the Madonna of Victories, in memory of so many glorious deeds of Christian arms.
ROSARY IN ART. — Although some 14th-century depictions of the rosary crown have survived, such as that in Dijon, where mourners holding rosaries are seen at the tomb of Philip the Bold of Burgundy, or that on the tomb slab of the Dauphin Humbert II (d. 1353) in Paris, and that on the tomb of Count Pieterkin (d. 1366) in the Dominican church in Ghent, nonetheless the earliest Madonnas of the Rosary, conceived as altarpieces, date only from the late 15th century. The triptych painted in the flowering Gothic style in the church of St. Andrew in Cologne, datable precisely to 1474—the year in which Bl. Alanus de Rupe founded the first confraternity of the Rosary—is admitted as the first example of a defined iconographic model of the Madonna of the Rosary. In this triptych, the Madonna, depicted in the center, holds the Christ Child, who offers a rosary to the family of the rosarians; on the wings are large figures of St. Dominic and St. Peter Martyr, and below, along the entire triptych in small proportions, are depicted kneeling the Bishop of Cologne, Emperor Frederick, Empress Eleanor, various princes, as well as many religious and faithful, all forming the family of rosarians gathered around the Virgin. This model of sacred depiction soon spread throughout Central Europe, as illustrated, albeit in a synthetic manner, by various popular engravings from the late 15th century, such as that of 1495 adorning the German Psalter "Unser Lieben Frauen Psalter." In a painting datable to 1520, formerly in the Rudolfinum in Prague, Albrecht Dürer expressed a different concept of the Madonna of the Rosary, depicting the Christ Child 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 and early 16th centuries did not leave an abundance of complete depictions of the Madonna of the Rosary. From the late 15th century is remembered the Madonna in Majesty with the Christ Child by Antonello da Messina, in the Civic Museum of Messina, where a rosary is seen placed at the feet of the Virgin. Then in 1539, Lorenzo Lotto created a splendid rep
