One Million Polish Catholics Set to Gather on Their Border for Rosary Crusade

 

Young Polish Catholics during a Marian procession, early 2017

From FSSPX.NEWS

As many as one million Poles are expected to take part in "The Rosary On the Borders," commemorating the Battle of Lepanto.

Polish Bishops have endorsed and encouraged the attendance of their congregations in this event, which takes place on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. The organizers of this event hope to attract a few thousand Catholics, but as the publicity and enthusiasm has grown, so have the numbers.

The crusade was organized independently of the Catholic Church in Poland, for the purposes of honoring Mary as Queen of Poland, asking for her protection and intercession, and begging forgiveness for blasphemies. The organizers describe their effort on their website:

On this day we will go to the borders of Poland and we will pray on [sic] the rosary. Through this unprecedented prayer of the rosary, we want to show the faithfulness and obedience of Mary, who tirelessly calls us to recite the rosary. We also want to apologize and pay for all blasphemy, insults against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. We wish to implore by the intercession of the Mother of God to save Poland and the world. We believe that if the Rosary is prayed by about a million Poles along the borders of the country, it may not only change the course of events, but open hearts of our compatriots to the grace of God.

A Significant Date

 

The Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary is a date of significance for this event, particularly for Europeans. On October 7, 1571, one of the most important sea battles in history was fought near the mouth of what is today called the Gulf of Patras, then the Gulf of Lepanto. On one side were the war galleys of the Holy League and, on the other, those of the Ottoman Turks, vying for ultimate control of the Mediterranean. Pope St. Pius V urged the Christian world to pray the Rosary, and ordered churches to be left open day and night.

Following the Christian victory in this battle, and with it, the spiritual, cultural, and political future of Europe, the Holy Father commemorated this date as the feast of "Our Lady of Victory".  His successor, Gregory XIII, would later change the title of the feast to its current form: "Our Lady of the Rosary.

The Event in 2017

 

While the event takes place on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, the participants note that it is also on a First Saturday as well as three anniversaries of note: 140 years since the apparitions of Our Lady in Gietrzwald (the only recognized Polish Marian apparition), 100 years following the apparitions of Fatima, and the eve of Poland's 100th year of independence.

The organizers and bishops are encouraging participation at the physical border of Poland, hoping to encircle the country with faithful Catholics reciting the rosary. Yet they welcome joining spiritually on the date and time (12:00 GMT) for those who are unable to travel.

Following the Society of Saint Pius X's Rosary Crusade, which ended just over one month ago, this event is an opportunity for faithful who attend SSPX chapels to join with the Polish people in prayer during this historic and grace-laden feast.

The Power of the Holy Rosary

The feast of Our Lady of the Rosary was instituted to honor Mary for the Christian victory over the Turks at Lepanto on October 7, 1571. Pope St. Pius V and all Christians had prayed the Rosary for victory. The Rosary, or the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is one of the best prayers to Mary, the Mother of God.

Pope Benedict XVI invites all families to pray the Rosary for the intentions of the Pope, the mission of the Church and peace. "It is as if every year Our Lady invited us to rediscover the beauty of this prayer, so simple and profound." The Rosary, a "contemplative and Christocentric prayer, inseparable from the meditation of Sacred Scripture," is "the prayer of the Christian who advances in the pilgrimage of faith, in the following of Jesus, preceded by Mary," said the Pontiff.

Read more at Catholic Culture >>

Father Rutler: Lepanto -The Crucial Battle

Our faith is based, not on abstract speculation, but on historical events. Christ does not hover around us as a philosophical idea, for he “was made flesh and dwelt among us.” The Church’s feasts are acts of thanksgiving for actions of God that have affected the course of human existence. On October 7, the Church celebrates the victory of Christian naval vessels over those of the Ottoman Muslims who outnumbered the Christians by more than two to one, and whose ships were manned by upwards of fifteen thousand Christian galley slaves.
 
The Battle of Lepanto in 1571 was the greatest naval engagement until the Battle of Jutland in World War I, but it is not commemorated just as a lesson in the art of maritime war. The core of the feast is that it saved Christian civilization. Compared to it, July 4 and Waterloo and Gettysburg and D-Day are ancillary struggles to preserve what would not exist at all, had it not been for 1571. Pope St. Pius V, by divine inspiration while praying the Rosary, announced in the Church of Santa Sabina that a triumph of the Cross had been won, at the very moment the battle was won in the Gulf of Patras in western Greece, though news of it would have taken many days to reach Rome by courier.
 
We revere the “Star Spangled Banner” whose broad stripes and bright stars gallantly streamed in 1814, but quite more remarkable was the banner held by Gianandrea Doria, great-nephew of the Admiral Andrea Doria, at Lepanto. It bore the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Lady had appeared in Mexico forty years earlier, but reproductions of the image had made it to old Europe, and King Philip of Spain had given one to the fleet. It has been preserved in the cathedral of Genoa. 
 
Had the battle ended differently, Sultan Selim could have fulfilled his vow to conquer Rome, turning the basilica of Saint Peter into a mosque, despoiling and upending its bells so that they might be filled with oil and burned in honor of Allah, as had been done in 997 at the tomb of Saint James in Compostela.

Is all this the dilettantish indulgence of the sort of people who watch the History Channel? We would not be here – nor would our holy religion, our universities, our science, our democracy, our enfranchised women, our justice, our social tolerance, and our entire moral fabric – were it not for Lepanto. The feast of its victory was instituted by Pope St. Pius V and, after the final defeat of the Ottomans in 1716 at Timișoara in present-day Romania, led by Prince Eugene of Savoy, Pope Clement XI made it a universal feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Given the terrors of our present times, it would be well to pray the Rosary on October 7.     

Bishop Compares Election To Battle of Lepanto

From Catholic World News

Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph compared the upcoming presidential election to the Battle of Lepanto, in which Christian forces against overwhelming odds defeated Ottoman Turkish invaders bent on the conquest of Europe. ‘Together with the other Bishops of Missouri I am calling on all the faithful to make this last week before the election a week of prayer for our nation-- a week of prayer for the protection of Human Life,’ Bishop Finn wrote in an October 24 diocesan newspaper column. ‘Join me in calling upon Mary in this month of the rosary. In In 1571, in the midst of the Battle of Lepanto, when the future of Christian Europe was in the balance and the odds against them were overwhelming, prayer to Our Lady of the Rosary brought the decisive victory. We ask her now to watch over our country and bring us the victory of life.’

‘Our Catholic moral principles teach that a candidate’s promise of economic prosperity is insufficient to justify their constant support of abortion laws, including partial-birth abortion, and infanticide for born-alive infants,’ Bishop Finn noted. ‘Promotion of the Freedom of Choice Act is a pledge to eliminate every single limit on abortions achieved over the last thirty-five years … I ask you to join me in invoking the Guardian Angels of 47 million babies lost through abortion in our country in the last thirty-five years. This horrendous loss of life remains one of the greatest threats to human civilization we have ever faced.’

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Bishop Finn: Week of Prayer for Our Country (Catholic Key)

An Epic Clash for the Dominion of Europe

Book Review by Matthew Price

Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World By Roger Crowley
Random House, 336 pp., $30

When Ottomans sacked Constantinople in 1453, Christian Europe shuddered. A fearsome Islamic empire had vanquished a city that, along with Rome, was a spiritual hub of the church. After the Ottomans took Egypt in 1517, Pope Leo fretted, "Now that the terrible Turk has Egypt and Alexandria and the whole of the Roman eastern empire in his power and has equipped a massive fleet in the Dardanelles, he will swallow not just Sicily and Italy but the whole world."

The pope's fears were perhaps exaggerated, but they were not unfounded. The Ottomans set their sites westward, pushing into Hungary, and took aim at the Mediterranean. The Ottoman ruler, Suleiman the Magnificent, fancied himself "Padisha of the White Sea," and his ambition unleashed a nearly 50-year struggle that would pit a divided Europe against a determined foe, heroic knights against crack troops of Ottoman janissaries, Christian against Muslim, and culminate in one of the most savage naval battles in history at Lepanto in 1571, where a coalition of Venetian, Italian, and Spanish ships routed Suleiman's navy off Greece.

In "Empires of the Sea," British historian Roger Crowley brings a keen grasp of early modern warfare and a gift for vivid writing to his absorbing and relentlessly bloody account of the conflict. Crowley has a fine eye for both the broad outlines of grand strategy and the horrific details of combat, as well as for the dramatis personae who shaped the conflict - the ambitious Suleiman, who led the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power; Charles V, the sickly but cunning Spanish king and Hapsburg emperor; the brave Jean de La Valette, grand master of the Knights of St. John, who led his men against a numerically superior foe at Malta; and Hayrettin Barbarossa, the ferocious corsair turned Ottoman naval commander.

Lepanto marked the close to a struggle that favored the Ottomans from the start. They first struck at Rhodes, the outpost of the knights, "a freak Christian survivor from the medieval Crusades located within touching distance of the Islamic world." The Christian presence on the island was an affront to Suleiman, who expelled the surviving knights from the island. Rhodes was a preview of things to come. The loss of the island spread alarm through Europe. Ottoman ships harassed Spanish outposts in Northern Africa. Barbarossa terrorized southern Italy, burning villages and enslaving their populations. Charles fought back, but, as Crowley points out, the Catholic monarch spent "more time, money, and energy fighting the French and the Protestants than he ever devoted to war with Suleiman."

By the 1560s, Suleiman had conquered most of the eastern Mediterranean. But the Knights of St. John remained a thorn in his side. From a base at Malta, where they settled after Rhodes, they harassed Ottoman ships in heavily armed galleys, taking Mecca-bound pilgrims as slaves.

The book highlights the siege of Malta in 1565. Once again, the knights would be on the front lines. A giant armada descended on the barren island. Here, Crowley describes the landings: It "was as if all the flamboyant spectacle of Asia had erupted onto the European shore. There were unfamiliar clothes, brilliant colors, outlandish hats: impressively mustachioed janissaries in trousers and long coats, cavalrymen in light mail, religious zealots in white, pashas in robes of apricot and green and gold, semi-naked dervishes in animal skins . . ."

The gaudy display could not conceal the fact that Malta was up against some of the best fighting men in the world. Aiming their canons at Fort Saint Elmo, "the key to all other fortresses of Malta" as one commander put it, they slowly pulverized the Maltese defenses. The battleground became a laboratory for the emerging gunpowder era. The Christians hurled primitive grenades at their foes, and deployed arquebuses - an unwieldy forerunner of the rifle - "that fired stones the size of pigeons' eggs.

The fight seesawed back and forth, leaving Malta devastated. Crowley writes, "Malta was unfinished business that lacked a conclusion." Lepanto brought about that conclusion. The last major naval engagement to feature oared galleys, a technology that looked back to ancient Greece, the fleets of the Holy League met the Ottomans - roughly 200 ships on either side - in a thunderous, five-hour collision in October 1571. A young Spanish sailor and would-be writer - Cervantes would later pen "Don Quixote" - called it "the greatest event witnessed by ages past, present, and to come." It was also a bloodbath. Historians have tended to downgrade the long-term significance of Lepanto, but a great empire suffered a catastrophe that marked a turning point in European history.

Matthew Price is a critic and journalist in Brooklyn.