Our Lady of the Rosary: The Pope at the Window

This article was originally published by America Needs Fatima

Picture Rome on the first Sunday of October 1571. The members of the Rosary confraternity are walking in procession through the city. In the Vatican, the Pope is walking through his rooms, talking over business with his treasurer. All at once he breaks away, opens a window and turns his eyes to heaven. More than eight hundred kilometres to the east, a battle is being fought.

Then he says something no messenger will bring to Rome for another two weeks.

The Dominican Pope

Michele Ghislieri was a Dominican friar long before he was a Pope. He was elected in January 1566 and took the name Pius V. As Pope he kept the habits of a friar. He banished luxury from his court, and every day he made at least two meditations on his knees before the Blessed Sacrament (Catholic Encyclopedia, Pope St. Pius V).

He prayed the Rosary faithfully. In 1569 he issued a bull, Consueverunt Romani Pontifices, that set out the form of the Rosary and commended it to the whole Church.

He came to the throne of Saint Peter at a dangerous hour. The Ottoman fleet went on raiding the Christian coasts of the Mediterranean. In 1566 the Turks took the island of Chios, which the Genoese Giustiniani family had ruled for more than two hundred years. The family was carried off to Constantinople, and its boys were kept at the Sultan’s court. Four brothers, Scipione, Cornelio, Ercole and Ippolito, refused to give up the Faith, and they were put to death.

Pius V saw two remedies and used both. He worked for years to bring the Catholic powers into a league against the Turks. And, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, he “strove, above all, with the greatest zeal, to obtain for Christendom the favour of the most powerful Mother of God” (Supremi Apostolatus Officio, 4).

The Holy League

The princes of Europe were slow to answer. One after another, they excused themselves. Spain and the Republic of Venice, the two powers with most to lose at sea, haggled for months over money and command, while the Pope, sick and in constant pain, kept pressing them. In May 1571 the agreement was finally made. Spain, Venice and the Papal States would put a fleet to sea together under one commander, Don John of Austria, with the Pope’s admiral, Marcantonio Colonna, as his deputy.

Don John was the twenty-four-year-old half-brother of King Philip II of Spain. The Pope sent him his blessing, and in August the banner of the League was handed to him at Naples.

In the middle of September a fleet of more than two hundred galleys sailed from Messina in Sicily. The Pope granted the men of the fleet a plenary indulgence, and chaplains went through the galleys hearing confessions and giving Holy Communion.

The news from Famagusta

The fleet worked its way down the coast of Greece. At Corfu the men found what the Turks had done there the month before: villages plundered and churches wrecked and desecrated.

In the first days of October worse news arrived. Famagusta, the last Venetian stronghold on Cyprus, had held out for nearly eleven months and then surrendered on honourable terms. A few days later the Turkish general broke them. The Venetian officers were hacked to death, and their governor, Marc Antonio Bragadino, was mutilated and later flayed alive.

On the morning of 7th October the fleet rounded the headland into the Gulf of Patras, where the Turks had come out from their base at Lepanto.

Sunday, 7th October 1571

The chaplains said Mass and gave absolution on the decks. The Turks came on from the east with the wind behind them, and the Christian galleys were outnumbered. Don John went along the line in a light galley, holding up a crucifix and calling out to each galley as he passed.

Then, just before the two lines met, the wind that had been carrying the Turks turned round to the opposite direction.

The Turkish ships came on yelling, screaming and beating drums and cymbals. On the Christian galleys there was silence, and the men prayed.

On the left, the Venetian commander Agostino Barbarigo lifted the visor of his helmet to direct his ships and was struck in the eye by an arrow. He was carried below, dying. His squadron held, and the Turkish wing was driven onto the shore.

In the centre, the two flagships made straight for each other. Ali Pasha’s galley, the Sultana, rammed Don John’s Real, and the two were lashed together. Turkish galleys closed in behind Ali Pasha to feed fresh men into the fight, the Venetian and papal flagships came up on either side of the Real, and the ships were soon locked together into one floating battlefield. At last soldiers from the Real and from Colonna’s galley stormed the Sultana. Ali Pasha was killed, and from that moment the Turks began to give way.

By evening it was over. The Holy League had won the largest sea battle the West had seen since ancient times. The Ottoman fleet lost about two hundred ships, sunk or captured, and some twelve thousand Christian slaves chained to the Turkish oars were released.

A soldier with a fever

Aboard a galley called the Marquesa was a twenty-four-year-old Spanish soldier who was sick with fever. He fought anyway, and took three wounds, two in the chest and one that cost him the use of his left hand for the rest of his life. His name was Miguel de Cervantes. More than forty years later, in the prologue to the second part of Don Quixote, he called the day of Lepanto the greatest occasion the past or the present had seen, or the future could hope to see.

What the Pope saw from the window

Girolamo Catena, who published a life of the Pope in 1586, fourteen years after his death, tells it this way. On the day of the battle, Pius V was walking through his rooms in the Vatican, discussing important business with several people, among them his treasurer, Bartolomeo Bussotti. All at once he broke away from them, opened a window and turned his eyes to heaven. Then he said:

“This is not the time for business; go and give thanks to God, because our fleet has fought with the Turkish fleet, and at this hour has won.”

Later tellings put cardinals in the room instead, as Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira did in a talk on this feast in 1964. In every version, the Pope knew before anyone could have told him. The courier reached Rome on the night of 21st October, two weeks after the battle.

How a victory became a feast

Pius V had no doubt about where the victory had come from. In 1572 he ordered that the anniversary be kept every year in honour of Our Lady of Victory. In 1573 his successor, Gregory XIII, allowed the feast of the Holy Rosary to be kept in every church that had an altar of the Rosary (Catholic Encyclopedia, Feast of the Holy Rosary).

In August 1716, Prince Eugene of Savoy defeated the Turks again, at Petrovaradin, then in Hungary and now in Serbia, and Pope Clement XI extended the feast to the whole Church. In 1883 Leo XIII asked that the whole month of October be given to the Rosary, and within a few years this became a yearly custom. That same year he added the invocation “Queen of the most holy Rosary” to the Litany of Loreto. In 1913 Saint Pius X returned the feast to its own day, 7th October.

What Our Lady asked for at Fatima

In 1917, nearly three and a half centuries after Lepanto, Our Lady appeared to three shepherd children at Fatima. At every one of her six apparitions, she asked them to pray the Rosary.

In July she told them to “continue to pray the Rosary every day in honour of Our Lady of the Rosary, in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war, because only she can help you” (Sister Lucia, Fourth Memoir). The children still did not know who she was. When Lucia asked, she promised to tell them in October.

On 13th October 1917, six days after the feast, she kept her promise:

“I am the Lady of the Rosary.”

She gave herself the title the Church had been honouring every October since Lepanto.

The Rosary in this country

Her title has a home in Australia. The cathedral of the Diocese of Broken Bay, at Waitara in Sydney’s north, is dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, and it became a cathedral in 2008.

In 1953 Father Patrick Peyton, the Irish-born priest who spent his life asking families to pray the Rosary together, brought his Family Rosary Crusade to Australia, and 150,000 people came to hear him in Melbourne. His motto was “The family that prays together stays together.” On Saturday 10th October, Catholics will gather in public places around this country to pray the Rosary aloud.

The Lepanto of each of our lives

Near the end of that 1964 talk, given on the feast itself, Professor Plinio urged his listeners to pray the whole Rosary every day. By an act of Our Lady’s generosity, he said, “the Lepanto of each of our lives” is already bound up with the daily Rosary.

Most of us will never see a battle at sea. Every family has its own Lepanto all the same. A son or daughter who no longer comes to Mass. An illness the doctors cannot cure. A marriage under strain. A temptation that keeps coming back.

Pius V could not sail with the fleet. He did what was in his power: he prayed, and he set himself to win Our Lady’s help for the men who could. That part of the story is within reach of anyone with a rosary.

What you can do

Pray the Rosary every day this month. Leo XIII asked it of the whole Church in 1883, and Our Lady asked it of three children at every one of her apparitions at Fatima.

On 7th October, pray it as a family, or go to Mass for the feast. One decade said together before dinner is a start.

End each Rosary this month with the invocation Leo XIII added to the Litany of Loreto: Queen of the most holy Rosary, pray for us.

If there is a public Rosary rally near you on Saturday 10th October, join it [link to the list of rallies]. On the day of Lepanto, the Rosary confraternity of Rome prayed in procession through its streets.

Keep the Five First Saturdays, as Our Lady asked, in reparation to her Immaculate Heart. Our article on the devotion explains how.

A prayer

The collect of the feast, which many Catholics also say at the end of the Rosary:

O God, whose only begotten Son, by His life, death and Resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of Eternal Life; grant, we beseech Thee, that while meditating upon these Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Queen of the most holy Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Pius V, pray for us.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

References

[1] The Rosary and the Battle of Lepanto - America Needs Fatima

[2] Royal Museums Greenwich, The Battle of Lepanto, 7th October 1571, unidentified artist, late 16th century. For the image at the top of the article.

[3] America Needs Fatima, “Our Lady of the Rosary”. For the later history of the feast and for Fatima.

[4] Catholic Encyclopedia, “Feast of the Holy Rosary”, Herbert Thurston. For the processions of the Rosary confraternity in Rome on the day of the battle, Gregory XIII’s grant of 1573, and Clement XI’s extension of the feast to the whole Church in 1716.

[5] Catholic Encyclopedia, “Pope St. Pius V”. For his life as Pope.

[6] Leo XIII, Supremi Apostolatus Officio, 1st September 1883, paragraph 4. For Pius V seeking the favour of the Mother of God for Christendom, and for October as the month of the Rosary.

[7] Biographical Dictionary of the Italians, “Giulio Giustiniani”. For the fall of Chios and the four Giustiniani brothers killed at the Sultan’s court.

[8] The Holy League agreement, 20th to 25th May 1571, article 17. For Don John of Austria as captain general and Marcantonio Colonna as his deputy.

[9] HistoryNet, “Twilight of the Galleys off Lepanto”. For the course of the campaign and the battle.

[10] Catholic Encyclopedia, “Battle of Lepanto”. For the Ottoman losses and the Christian slaves released.

[11] Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part Two (1615), Prologue to the Reader. For Cervantes on the battle.

[12] Girolamo Catena, Life of the Most Glorious Pope Pius V (Rome, 1586), as quoted by Ecclesia Dei. For the Pope at the window.

[13] Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, “Our Lady of the Rosary”, a talk of 7th October 1964, published by Mijn Onbevlekt Hart. For his telling of the Pope’s vision and for “the Lepanto of each of our lives”.

[14] Catholic Encyclopedia, “Litany of Loreto”. For the invocation Queen of the most holy Rosary.

[15] Sister Lucia, Fourth Memoir, in Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words, as given by the Shrine of Fatima. For Our Lady’s words of 13th July and 13th October 1917.

[16] Catholic Diocese of Broken Bay, “History of Hornsby”. For Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral, Waitara.

[17] Dictionary of Irish Biography, “Peyton, Patrick Joseph”. For the Family Rosary Crusade in Australia in 1953 and its motto.

[18] Australian Catholic Historical Society, “1951 to 2020”. For the crowd at the Melbourne crusade of 1953.

[19] Australia Needs Fatima, “Prayers, Meditations and Devotions”. For the text of the prayer above.

Last updated: 2 October 2026 08:42