A more simple and still more elevated way of reciting the Rosary is, while saying it, to keep the eyes of faith fixed on the living Jesus who is always making intercession for us and who is acting upon us in accordance with the mysteries of His childhood, or His Passion, or His glory. He comes to us to make us like Himself. Let us fix our gaze on Jesus Who is looking at us. His look is more than kind and understanding: it is the look of God, a look which purifies, which sanctifies, which gives peace. It is the look of our Judge and still more the look of our Savior, our Friend, the Spouse of our soul. A Rosary prayed in this way, in solitude and silence, is a most fruitful encounter with Jesus. It is a conversation with Mary too which leads us to intimacy with her Son.



-------- Rev. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P.



Today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. The devotion is strongly identified with Saint Dominic and the feast was instituted by the sainted Dominican Pope Pius V to commemorate the great naval victory of the combined papal, Spanish, Venetian, and Genoese fleets under Don John of Austria over the Turkish fleet at Lepanto on this date in 1571.



The Rosary has been called “the school of contemplation” because it introduces the faithful to meditative prayer on the themes of particular events in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ and of His passion, death, resurrection and ascension and on His gracious favor to the Blessed Virgin Mary, His mother and ours. Pope John XXIII referred to the Rosary as "the psalter of the poor" and the title of Mary as Queen of the Most Holy Rosary fittingly appears among those others of noble beauty in the hymn to "our tainted nature's solitary boast," The Litany of Loreto.