(Deepstranslator)
And when he had come in to her, he said, Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.1 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) as a symbol of joy. Her images were adorned as they are today with a crown or bouquet of roses (in medieval Latin Rosarium), an expression of the praises that were born from a heart full of love. And those who could not recite the one hundred and fifty psalms of the Divine Office substituted them for as many Hail Marys, using them to count the grains threaded by tens or knots made in a rope. At the same time, the life of the Virgin and of the Lord was meditated upon. This prayer of the Hail Mary, always recited in the Church and frequently recommended by Popes and Councils in a shorter form, later acquires its definitive form when the petition for a good death is 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 lives of Jesus and Mary, as a compendium of the liturgical year and of the whole Gospel. The prayer of the litanies was also fixed, which are a song full of love, of praise to Our Lady and of petitions, of manifestations of joy and happiness.
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 through the Holy Rosary, and instituted the feast that we celebrate today. 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 in the face of 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 Mother in Heaven especially through this Marian devotion, we must think about how lovingly we pray, how we contemplate each of her mysteries, whether we put forth petitions filled with holy ambition, like those Christians who, with their prayer, obtained from the Virgin this victory so transcendental for all Christianity. In the face of so many difficulties as we sometimes experience, in the face of so much help as we need in the apostolate, to move 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 a powerful weapon today, to win in our interior struggle, and to help all souls.
Hablar con Dios