Why is October dedicated to the rosary?
From 11-12 October, as part of the 2025 Jubilee of Hope, Catholic pilgrims will gather in Rome to celebrate Marian devotion. They will pass through the Holy Door at St. Peter’s and visit the Basilica of Mary Major, the world’s largest church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the oldest Marian church in Rome. They will venerate the original statue of Our Lady of Fátima, which will be on display in the Church of Santa Maria in Transpontina, and pray the rosary before it. On Saturday evening, they will follow the statue’s procession to St. Peter’s Square, where Pope Leo will preside over a prayer vigil for peace. “I invite everyone, each day of the coming month, to pray the rosary for peace—personally in the family, and in the community,” Leo said before the Jubilee of Marian Spirituality.
October is a special month for Marian devotion, and specifically, the use of the holy rosary as a devotional practice. The Catholic Church first dedicated the month of October to the Holy Rosary in 1883, when Pope Leo XIII wrote his first of twelve encyclicals on the rosary. This year, Pope Leo XIV invited all Catholics to use the rosary to pray for peace worldwide. The use of the rosary as a devotional aid has a rich history. Rooted in early Christianity, it blossomed in the later Middle Ages as part of the flowering of Marian devotion. The historical origins of Marian prayers and the use of the rosary add extra meaning to the Catholic rituals that are still practiced today.
The earliest Marian hymns asked the Mother of God to serve as protector and intercessor. Sub Tuum Praedisium (“Under Your Mercy”), the first of such prayers in the third century, marked the beginning of an extensive tradition of Christian prayers, hymns, and other liturgical materials that petitioned the Virgin Mary for intercession. Recognizing her exclusive ability to plead to Christ on behalf of supplicants, it implores, “We fly to Thy protection, O Holy Mother of God; Do not despise our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O Glorious and Blessed Virgin. Amen.”
But the prayer most familiar to Catholics is the Hail Mary. It is recited in sets of ten as one ruminates on the joyful, sorrowful, glorious, and—added by Pope John Paul II in 2002—luminous mysteries. (Other prayers are also said during the rosary, but the Hail Mary is the most frequently recited.) The Ave Maria, as the prayer is known in Latin, derives from the Gospel of Luke. The first part of the prayer consists of the Archangel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary (Luke 1:28) and Mary’s cousin Elizabeth’s greeting (Luke 1:42). It’s worth noting that the word “Mary” was not part of Gabriel’s greeting; her name was only added later on, as noted in Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the prayer. Throughout the thirteenth century, the Ave Maria grew in prominence. Christians used the angelic salutation in different components of prayer, as illustrated across a variety of visual and written media. An illuminated manuscript from 1415 depicting the Annunciation shows a ribbon of speech around Garbriel reading Ave Gratia Plena Dominus Tecum, or, “Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you.” It also depicts the Virgin Mary reading a devotional text, highlighting how the later Middle Ages depicted her as a literate woman. The final part of the Hail Mary (“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death”) was not added until later in the fifteenth century. Many historians attribute the gravity of the Black Death, the pandemic that killed roughly a third of the world’s population, as a major reason to include this final line, which acknowledges our looming mortality.
Though devotion to Mary increased in the Middle Ages, early Christians often used prayer beads or knotted ropes to guide them in prayer, most notably when they were reciting the 150 psalms. Thanks to a legend promulgated by fifteenth-century Dominican historian Alan de la Roche, St. Dominic (1170–1221) is commonly associated with some of the earliest references to the rosary. According to de la Roche, Dominic had a vision in which the Blessed Mary gave him a set of rosary beads to aid in his devotion. Though the association of the rosary with Dominic was a medieval phenomenon, Christians regularly used the rosary as a mode of instruction in their homes. Mothers taught their children simple prayers and how to follow the basic tenets of Christianity through prayer aids like devotional books and rosary beads. Later, rosary confraternities emerged in the late fifteenth century and became one of the most popular Marian practices in the early modern period. Woodcuts produced by printing presses further popularized the practice of praying the rosary.
In the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church promoted new Marian feasts, including the feast of Our Lady of Victory, which commemorates the October 7, 1571 Battle of Lepanto. During the battle, an Ottoman fleet attacked the Holy League, an alliance of Spain, Venice, and papal forces. The Christian fighters raised a banner on their ships emblazoned with an image of the Virgin. Their ensuing victory was widely attributed to Mary’s intervention. Pope Pius V declared October 7 the feast day Our Lady of Victory, framing Mary as a victorious military leader worthy of special veneration. A year later, Pope Gregory XIII renamed the feast Our Lady of the Rosary, in acknowledgement of the many Christians in Rome who fervently recited the rosary on the day of the victory at Lepanto. The creation of this feast day brought the ritual into the mainstream of Catholic devotional practices, and millions of Catholics still maintain the tradition today.
Celebrating the First Vespers for the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, Pope Leo wore a newly commissioned cream-and-blue cope as part of his vestments. Although blue is not one of the typical liturgical colors (white, red, green, and gold are all much more common), the color is often associated with the Virgin Mary, who was most commonly illustrated wearing blue robes. This artistic trend originated during the Byzantine Empire. Beginning around 500 CE, blue was the color worn by empresses, and Mary was often rendered as a regal figure. Later in the Middle Ages, European artists began importing lapis lazuli, a blue semiprecious stone, from present-day Afghanistan, and grinding it into powder. Because the cost of importing the stone was so high, the color blue was reserved for angels or the Blessed Virgin Mary.
As part of the Marian Jubilee this weekend, pilgrims are invited to visit the tomb of Pope Francis, who chose to be buried in Mary Major because of his personal devotion to Mary. Near his tomb, pilgrims can also see the sixth-century Byzantine icon Salus Populi Romani (Salvation for the Roman People), which Pope Francis used during an extraordinary blessing in March 2020 to ask for Mary’s intercession amid the coronavirus pandemic. Yet one need not make a pilgrimage to Rome to seek Mary’s intercession—especially during the month dedicated to the Holy Rosary. The prayers of the rosary, like the connecting beads themselves, unite Catholics across centuries and nations in a shared appeal for peace.
Dr. Vanessa R. Corcoran is an advising dean and history professor in the College of Arts & Sciences at Georgetown University. In addition to Commonweal, her writing has been published in America Magazine, Today’s American Catholic, and Perspectives on History.
Reproduced with permission from Commonweal.
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