A Novena to Our Lady of the Rosary
Psalterium Beatae Mariae Virginis
Lepanto
The Novena Prayer
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life: grant, we beseech thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ our Lord.
The date in the calendar is the date of a sea battle. The fleet of the Holy League met the Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Patras on 7 October 1571, and Pius V, who had asked for the Rosary to be prayed for the outcome, instituted a feast of Our Lady of Victory in thanksgiving for it. Whatever one makes of the causation, that is where 7 October comes from.
Renamed Within Two Years
The Novena Prayer
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life: grant, we beseech thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ our Lord.
The feast did not keep the name it was given. In 1573 Gregory XIII changed it from Our Lady of Victory to the feast of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and moved it to the first Sunday of October, which is where it sat for the next three hundred and forty years.
Extended to Everyone
The Novena Prayer
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life: grant, we beseech thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ our Lord.
For a century and a half the feast was kept only in some places. Clement XI commanded it for the universal Church after the imperial victory at Petrovaradin on 5 August 1716, which is to say that a second battle was needed before the first battle's feast belonged to everybody.
Back to the Seventh
The Novena Prayer
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life: grant, we beseech thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ our Lord.
Pius X moved the feast back onto 7 October itself in 1913, as part of a wider effort to clear the Sundays of the year for the Sunday liturgy. The calendar of Paul VI, in 1969, kept it there and settled on the title it now carries, the memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary.
Not Saint Dominic
The Novena Prayer
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life: grant, we beseech thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ our Lord.
The story that Our Lady gave the Rosary to St. Dominic is not history, and the Catholic Encyclopedia says so at length. Of the eight or nine early Lives of Dominic, not one mentions the Rosary; it appears in no evidence given at his canonisation, and in no record of his order between 1220 and 1450. The attribution begins with Alan de Rupe, a Dominican preaching around 1470, some two hundred and fifty years after Dominic died. The devotion is not less for having grown rather than been handed down.
The Psalter of Mary
The Novena Prayer
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life: grant, we beseech thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ our Lord.
The old name for the beads is the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin, and the number explains itself: a hundred and fifty Hail Marys for the hundred and fifty psalms. Monks recited the psalter; those who could not read said an Ave in place of each psalm and kept the same shape of prayer. The Rosary began as the poor man's breviary.
The Paternoster Makers
The Novena Prayer
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life: grant, we beseech thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ our Lord.
Counting beads were a trade before they were a devotion of this particular form. Strings of them were called paternosters, after the prayer they were first used to count, and the makers had a guild: paternosterers are on record in Paris in 1268. London's Paternoster Row is named for the same craft.
The Mysteries Came Later
The Novena Prayer
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life: grant, we beseech thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ our Lord.
Attaching a scene from the life of Christ to each decade was a later invention, generally credited to Dominic the Prussian, a Carthusian of Trier in the early fifteenth century. Even at the end of that century the methods in circulation varied enormously, with different sets of mysteries and different numbers of them; the fifteen that most people think of as ancient are the ones that won.
Fifteen Becomes Twenty
The Novena Prayer
O God, whose only begotten Son, by his life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life: grant, we beseech thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ our Lord.
Leo XIII wrote twelve encyclicals on the Rosary, beginning with Supremi apostolatus officio on 1 September 1883, which is why he is remembered as the Rosary pope. The most recent change is more recent than many who pray it: on 16 October 2002, in the apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, John Paul II proposed the five Luminous Mysteries, taking the Rosary from fifteen mysteries to twenty.
The prayer above is the collect said at the end of the Rosary, of unknown authorship and long in the Roman books, given here in the older public-domain English; it also closes each set of mysteries at the Rosary, where the twenty mysteries are set out in full with their Scripture. This novena is about the devotion rather than a substitute for it, and the honest history is better than the popular one — day five says why. See also the novena to Our Lady of Fatima, whose title is Queen of the Most Holy Rosary. What follows each day is a fact about the beads, the feast or the mysteries, one per day.
