The Battle of Lepanto, Our Lady, and the Holy Rosary

Today is the 450th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto. In later years, the anniversary of this day was celebrated as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory and later, Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. 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.

Many years later, I was privileged to see one of the Christian battle flags from the battle in the Cathedral museum at Santiago de Compostela. Francine took a photo of me with it, but for some reason neither of us can find it now. I reckon I’ll have to go back and get another photo.

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.

True story: more than thirty years after my high school report on Lepanto, Francine and I became parishioners at Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church in Tacoma.

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?

Its origins are in the Divine Office – instead of 150 psalms those without recourse to (very expensive) books would pray 150 beads. But the gift has been returned: the antiphons for monastic Lauds this morning are the Glorious Mysteries.

1. Rejoice, O Virgin Mother; Christ hath risen from the grave.
2. God ascendeth amid shouts of triumph, the Lord with the sound of trumpets.
3. The Spirit of the Lord hath filled the whole world.
4. Mary has been taken up into heaven; the Angels rejoice; praising they bless the Lord, alleluia.
5. The Virgin Mary has been exalted above the choirs of Angels, and on her head is a crown of twelve stars.

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.

O God, Whose only-begotten Son
by His life, death, and resurrection
hath purchased for us the reward of eternal salvation,
grant, we beseech Thee,
that meditating on these mysteries
in the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
we may both imitate what they contain
and obtain what they promise.

Through the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son our Lord,
Who with Thee liveth and reigneth
in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God,
world without end. Amen.