Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary

On October 7, the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the yearly
feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Known for several centuries by the
alternate title of “Our Lady of Victory,” the feast day takes place in
honor of a 16th century naval victory which secured Europe against
Turkish invasion. Pope St. Pius V attributed the victory to the
intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was invoked on the day of
the battle through a campaign to pray the Rosary throughout Europe.
The feast always occurs one week after the similar Byzantine
celebration of the Protection of the Mother of God, which most Eastern
Orthodox Christians and Eastern Catholics celebrate on October 1 in
memory of a 10th-century military victory which protected Constantinople
against invasion after a reported Marian apparition.
Pope Leo XIII was particularly devoted to Our Lady of the Rosary,
producing 11 encyclicals on the subject of this feast and its importance
in the course of his long pontificate.
In the first of them, 1883's “Supremi Apostolatus Officio,” he echoed
the words of the oldest known Marian prayer (known in the Latin
tradition as the “Sub Tuum Praesidium”), when he wrote, “It has always
been the habit of Catholics in danger and in troublous times to fly for
refuge to Mary.”
“This devotion, so great and so confident, to the august Queen of
Heaven,” Pope Leo continued, “has never shone forth with such brilliancy
as when the militant Church of God has seemed to be endangered by the
violence of heresy … or by an intolerable moral corruption, or by the
attacks of powerful enemies.” Foremost among such “attacks” was the
battle of Lepanto, a perilous and decisive moment in European and world
history.
Troops of the Turkish Ottoman Empire had invaded and occupied the
Byzantine empire by 1453, bringing a large portion of the increasingly
divided Christian world under a version of Islamic law. For the next
hundred years, the Turks expanded their empire westward on land, and
asserted their naval power in the Mediterranean. In 1565 they attacked
Malta, envisioning an eventual invasion of Rome. Though repelled at
Malta, the Turks captured Cyprus in the fall of 1570.
The next year, three Catholic powers on the continent – Genoa, Spain,
and the Papal States - formed an alliance called the Holy League, to
defend their Christian civilization against Turkish invasion. Its fleets
sailed to confront the Turks near the west coast of Greece on October
7, 1571.
Crew members on more than 200 ships prayed the Rosary in preparation
for the battle - as did Christians throughout Europe, encouraged by the
Pope to gather in their churches to invoke the Virgin Mary against the
daunting Turkish forces.
Some accounts say that Pope Pius V was granted a miraculous vision of
the Holy League's stunning victory. Without a doubt, the Pope
understood the significance of the day's events, when he was eventually
informed that all but 13 of the nearly 300 Turkish ships had been
captured or sunk. He was moved to institute the feast now celebrated
universally as Our Lady of the Rosary.
“Turkish victory at Lepanto would have been a catastrophe of the
first magnitude for Christendom,” wrote military historian John F.
Guilmartin, Jr., “and Europe would have followed a historical trajectory
strikingly different from that which obtained.”