And when he had entered where she was, he said to her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you1. With these words the angel greeted Our Lady, and we have repeated them countless times in very different tones and circumstances.
In the Middle Ages the Virgin Mary was greeted with the title of rose (Rosa mystica), symbol of joy. Her images were adorned as now with a crown or bouquet of roses (in medieval Latin Rosarium), expression of the praises that were born of a heart full of love. And those who could not recite the one hundred and fifty psalms of the Divine Office substituted them with as many Hail Marys, using to count them grains threaded by dozens or knots made in a rope. At the same time, they meditated on the life of the Virgin and of the Lord. This prayer of the Hail Mary, always recited in the Church and frequently recommended by the Popes and Councils in a shorter form, later acquired its definitive form when the petition for a good death was added: pray for us, sinners, now and at the hour of our death. In every situation, now, and at the supreme moment of meeting the Lord. The mysteries are also structured, thus contemplating the central events of the life of Jesus and Mary, as a compendium of the liturgical year and of the whole Gospel. The recitation of the litanies was also established, which are a song full of love, of praises to Our Lady and of petitions, of manifestations of joy and gladness.
St. Pius V attributed the victory of Lepanto, on October 7, 1571, with which serious threats to the faith of Christians disappeared, to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, invoked in Rome and throughout the Christian world by means of the Holy Rosary, and the feast that we celebrate today was instituted. On this occasion, the invocation Auxilium christianorum was added to the litanies. Since then, this devotion to Our Lady has been constantly recommended by the Roman Pontiffs as "a public and universal prayer for the ordinary and extraordinary needs of the holy Church, of the nations and of the whole world.
In this month of October, which the Church dedicates to honoring Our Heavenly Mother especially through this Marian devotion, we should think with what love we pray it, how we contemplate each of its mysteries, if we make petitions full of holy ambition, like those Christians who with their prayer obtained from Our Lady this victory so transcendental for the whole of Christianity. Before so many difficulties as we sometimes experience, before so much help as we need in the apostolate, to bring the family forward and to bring it closer to God, in the battles of our interior life, we cannot forget that, "as in other times, the Rosary must be today a powerful weapon, to win in our interior struggle, and to help all souls "3.
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