Our Lady of Victory

Back in high school, a group of us did an extensive report on the events of this day for my freshman history class. We had flip chart maps, reenactments, and gave three separate papers.

For on this day in 1571, the naval forces of a Holy League, consisting of several maritime Catholic countries, met the main Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto.

The Ottoman Turks were on the warpath in eastern Europe, and their ships basically had the run of the Mediterranean, pillaging the coastal lands and taking many thousands of Christians as slaves.

Pope Pius V organized the league to challenge Ottoman naval supremacy.

The Holy League had a total of 208 ships to the Ottoman 251, and they were vastly outnumbered in terms of manpower, which on the Ottoman side included Christian slaves as oarsmen.

The Spanish, who provided the bulk of the Christian naval forces, put the fleet under the command of the bastard son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the famous Don Juan de Austria.

As the two fleets sought each other in the eastern Mediterranean, the Pope called for all of Christian Europe to pray the Rosary for victory against the Ottomans.

To make a long story short, the Battle of Lepanto was a decisive victory for the Holy League. Some ten thousand Christian slaves were freed, and Ottoman naval power was broken forever. It was the beginning of the end of the Ottoman military advance in Europe. Although their high-water mark was undoubtedly the Siege of Vienna almost a century later, it was Lepanto that brought the idea of inevitable Ottoman hegemony to a sudden stop. After Vienna, that stop became a collapse.

The Church, and indeed the victorious fleet commanders themselves, attributed the victory at Lepanto to God through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Feast of Our Lady of Victory was established for this day in grateful thanksgiving. I’ve been to the small Chiesa di Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. It contains Bernini’s incomparable statue of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, as well as a small museum.

While the victory for which this particular church was dedicated was that of White Mountain in 1620, the museum does have several captured Ottoman naval banners on display. I remember thinking with awe that these were the very flags under which the Turks intended to conquer Christendom.

Eventually, the feast was renamed Our Lady of the Rosary.

The Rosary is a powerful, moving prayer. Many of my Protestant friends don’t understand it, or even treat the very idea of it with disdain. Some point to what they imagine to be an admonition against repetitive prayer in Matthew 6:7. Some just object to the “Hail Mary” (Ave Maria) in general, even though its origins may be found in Luke’s Gospel.

I don’t really know how to answer these objections, as they seem to largely miss the point.

The “verbal” prayers of the Rosary are clearly meant to put our minds into a prayerful state where we can better contemplate the Mysteries, which are after all the true object of the Rosary. With the Rosary, we are training our minds to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), the same way that some Eastern Christians use the Jesus prayer.

The Rosary is a prayer in which we simultaneously use all the faculties God has given to us, so engaging our whole selves in prayer. It physically engages the body (the movement of our fingers across the beads), it verbally engages the intellect (the recital of the Aves, Paters, and doxologies), and it spiritually engages our imaginations (the contemplation of the mysteries). In the Rosary, we give ourselves over to God, body, mind, and soul.

How can that not be a good thing?

So on this day dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, in this month of October dedicated to praying the Rosary, I call on every Christian to give themselves over to this amazing prayer.

Pray for your own intentions, pray for the intentions of others, pray for those who have no one else to pray for them. Pray for Christian unity. And pray for victory – for a share in Christ’s final victory over death is ours for the asking.

Photo by Peter Lemieux (source)

(this is a reprint of an article that originally appeared in 2011)

Edited to add: Father Steve Grunow has a more comprehensive article on the feast and the battle over at Word on Fire. Check it out!