Pope Leo XIII on the Holy Rosary 2025 | NLM

https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2025/10/pope-leo-xiii-on-holy-rosary-2025.html

By Gregory Dipippo

Excerpt

As has now been our tradition for several years, we commemorate the feast of the Holy Rosary with some excerpts from one of the encyclicals on the subject by His Holiness Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903). Altogether, he wrote eleven of these, all published in September (except one, at the very end of August), looking forward to the feast, which in his time was kept on the first Sunday of October. In 1911, with the reform of the breviary and liturgical calendar, his successor Pope St Pius X fixed it to October 7, the date of the famous Battle of Lepanto which it commemorates.

Driven, therefore, by a constant desire that the Christian people should ever be convinced of the power and dignity of Mary’s Rosary, having first recalled that the origin of this prayer is divine rather than human, we showed it to be an admirable garland woven from the Angelic Salutation, interspersed with the Lord’s Prayer, and joined to the observance of meditation, and a form of prayer most powerful and particularly fruitful for the attainment of immortal life. For besides the excellence of the prayers, it affords a suitable protection of the faith, and an outstanding model of virtue through the mysteries proposed for contemplation. (We showed) further how easy the devotion is and how suited to the character of the people, since it offers them an absolutely perfect model of domestic life in consideration of the Holy Family of Nazareth, and that therefore the Christian people has never failed to experience its most salutary power.

For these reasons especially, we have repeatedly encouraged the recitation of the Holy Rosary, and have endeavored to increase its dignity by a more solemn cult, following in this the footsteps of our predecessors. For just as Pope Sixtus V of happy memory approved the ancient custom of reciting the Rosary, and Gregory XIII dedicated a feast to this title, which Clement VIII then inscribed in the martyrology, Clement XI ordered to be kept by the universal Church, and Benedict XIII inserted into the Roman Breviary, so did we, in perpetual testimony of our affection for this devotion, command that the same solemnity with its office should be celebrated in the universal Church as a double of the second class, and will that the entire month of October be consecrated to this devotion. Finally, we ordered that the invocation “Queen of the most Holy Rosary” be added to the Litany of Loreto an augury of victory in our present warfare.