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St. Dominic and the Rosary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2024
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The familiar representations of our blessed Lady giving a rosary to St. Dominic are symbolical of a tradition, so tenaciously upheld by the Church, that she not only insists upon such representations being placed on, or near, the Rosary Altar in every church where the Confraternity of the Rosary is established, but forbids all representations of Our Lady giving a rosary to any other Saint.
This tradition has been questioned, being alleged to date only from the time of Alan de la Roche, who was born in 1428. This zealous preacher of the devotion of the Rosary, so it is insinuated, foisted upon a credulous public the legend that St. Dominic had been commanded by the Mother of God to preach the Rosary, and the legend has persisted ever since his day. Alan appealed to ‘tradition and documents’ in support of his assertion, but there are no documents, we are told, and there is no tradition anterior to Alan himself. If this were indeed the truth, it is amazing that Alan could have succeeded in causing his claim to be accepted. Even if criticism in those days was not so acute or perfect as it is in our own, it is difficult to think that there were no critics able and ready to show that Alan was romancing. We do no know if Alan was brought to book for his statement, nor have we found that he was accused of having invented or imagined it. But the later critics do not fail to emphasize the silence of St. Dominic’s early biographers with regard to the Rosary, pointing out that there is no mention, direct or indirect, by these writers, their contemporaries, or immediate successors, of the supposed fact that the Founder of the Order of Preachers was also the Founder of the Rosary.
Disregarding the various theories that have been put forward in place of accepted tradition, we offer for consideration the following facts which will be found both illuminating and authoritative.
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- Copyright © 1939 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 A picture in the chapel of the Franciscans at Toulouse in which Our Lady was shown as giving a rosary to St. Francis and St. Clare was condemned by Pope Alexander VII in 1663. Twenty years later the Congregation of the Index condemned another picture of Our Lady between two saints of the Society of Jesus, to one of whom she gave a book and to the other a rosary, and which bore the inscription: The Virgin Mother of God with her Son, inspires and recommends to the Society of Jesus the institution of sodalities and the use of the Office and of the Rosary: Deipara Virgo cum Filio inspirat corrmendatque Societati Jesu institutionem sodalitatum et officii Rosariique usum; cf. Histoire des Maîtres Generaux de l'Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs, by Montier, Père, O.P.; Vol. VII, p. 203. Google ScholarLe Rosaire et la Nouvelle Critique, Pere Etchevery, O.P.; p. 13.
2 Le Rosaire aux XIII et XIV sièecles. L'Année Dominicaine, octobre, 1925. Closer examination of the manuscript gave further results which Father Gorce published in a volume in 1931: Le Rosaire et ses Antécédents Historiques. We shall give a brief summary of this very interesting book.
3 Pp. 9–31. Cf. Le Sainte Rosaire, by the late Bishop Thomas Esser, O.P., Chapter IV.
4 Cf. The Month, June, 1908, where this custom is described by Father Thurston, S.J.
5 Op. cit., ibid., pp. 14–34.
6 Ibid., pp. 86, sqq.
7 We give the Old French verses as Father Gorce has published them:
La benigne Marie
Qui est de l'ordre la baillie,
Mes par dessus mestre et mestreuse.
C'est icelle que l'ordre addresse
Et defend et deffendra
Qui l'ordre grieve li meschera. Folio 14.
8 Ibid., p. 52.
9 Histoire de la Littérature Française, p. 393. Quoted by L'nrée Dominicaine, October, 1925; p. 434, Note.
10 Gorce, p. 53, folio 21 recto.
11 Ibid., p. 55, folio 24 verso.
12 Ibid., p. 57.
Met ceste rose en ton chief
Ele t'ostera tout mischief. Folio 33 verso.
13 Ibid., pp. 61–62, folio 45.
14 Ibid., p. 59, folio 42 recto.
15 Ibid., p. 60, folio 42 recto.
16 Haec est dies in qua suu Vota tibi, Virgo, tua reddit haec familia. Cf. De Vita Regulari, Humberti de Romanis. Ed. Berthier. Vol. II, pp. 73–75.
17 Gorce, pp. 64–65, folio 48.
18 Ibid., p. 65, folio 48 verso.
19 Ibid., p. 67, folio 57 verso.
20 Ibid., p. 72, folio 189.
21 Ibid., p. 75, folio 238 verso.
Saint Dominicque fut preudome
Du saint Esprit eut les VII dons.
22 Ibid., p. 75, folio 238.
23 ‘Rurninans Puerum Jesum et Dominam Mariam Matrem ejus.’
24 Le Rosaire de Marie. Editions du Cerf, 1933, p. 225. In this small volume Père Joret gives the principal passages from the Encyclicals and Letters of Pope Leo XIII on the Rosary in Latin and French. It is regrettable that in the volume published by Benziger in 1903, The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII, not a single Encyclical on the Rosary is included. Pope Leo XIII published twelve Encyclical Letters on the Rosary between 1883 and 1898; a Papal Brief on the Rosary in 1883; an Apostolic Letter on the Rosary in 1901, and two other Letters on the Rosary in 1886 and 1887, but none of these documents are included in the above volume.
25 We give three stanzas of this poem and italicise certain words:
Dominicus rosas affere
Dum incipit tam humilis,
Dominus coronas conferre
Statim apparat agilis.
Veritas surgit triumphans
Quia Dominicus praedicans
Coelum et terram commovit.
Dominicus ab oratione
Finem malorum obtinet,
Et dum pugnat praedicatione
Sortem justorum sustinet.
26 Cf. especially Pope Benedict XV, Encyclical Letter for the Seventh Centenary of Saint Dominic published on June 29th, 1921, where we read that Our Lady had ‘used the ministry of St. Dominic to teach the Most Holy Rosary to the Church.’ Also Pope Pius XI, Apostolic Letter to the Father General of the Order of Preachers on the occasion of the Seventh Centenary of the Canonization of St. Dominic, March, 1934, in which we read: ‘Amongst the arms which St. Dominic used for the conversion of heretics, the most powerful, as the faithful well know, was the Rosary of Mary, the method of which was revealed by the Blessed Virgin herself, and is propagated far and wide throughout the Catholic world.’ And, finally, the Encyclical Letter on the Rosary, 1937, in which the late Holy Father says of this devotion that ‘St. Dominic promoted it in a wonderful way not without inspiration from the Mother of God and heavenly admonitions.’ Later, in the same Encyclical, he speaks of Lourdes, where ‘the most holy Virgin has also in our own times most strongly commended this form of prayer … and taught a pure maid to recite it by her own example.’ Here, indeed, Our Lady of Lourdes has, in the words of Père Cros, S.J., ‘made the Wild Rose‐bush bloom again, in the Rosary of St. Dominic, Our Lady's Garland of Roses.’
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