Champion of Our Lady

Devotion to the Rosary was revived in the late 15th century by a Dominican Friar, as Alan Frost explains

Blessed Alan de la Roche is probably little known among the Catholic population of the UK. It is also probable that he never visited these shores. Even so, his name should be well known, for he was instrumental in the revival and promotion of the prayer so special to Our Lady, the Rosary.

His time is the 15th century, particularly the years 1460 to his death in 1475, broadly two hundred and fifty years after St Dominic’s astonishing ministry. He was about 22 when he joined the Order of Preachers in 1450, distinguishing himself as a scholar in Paris before returning to Dinan, a convent in his native Brittany. Here he gained a reputation as a fine preacher and teacher of novices, but his calling was to be much more than these things.

According to his own writings, one day in 1460 he was celebrating Mass (possibly in Paris, rather than Dinan, where he was completing a work on The Sententiae of Peter Lombard) when he heard Christ speaking to him from the Host he was elevating. The words were a stern admonition: “You have all the learning and understanding that you need to preach My Mother’s rosary and you are not doing so. If you only did this you could teach many souls the right path and lead them away from sin…” Shocked and horrified he resolved to devote himself to promoting the Rosary. Shortly after, he received words of encouragement in his task from Our Lady herself and would subsequently receive further supernatural messages and visions. These included words from St Dominic recounting his own great success in teaching the Rosary, or the ‘Psalter of Jesus and Mary’ as it was originally known. This was because the number of prayers equalled the number of psalms in the Bible and were said by many instead of them, or as they heard them being chanted.

Blessed Alan de la Roche depicted in an early woodcut

This, then, can be taken as the beginning of Blessed Alan’s role as the champion of Our Lady in promoting this most special of devotions, a devotion the world has been urged to practise down the ages by the Blessed Virgin herself. Starting from St Dominic, moving on to Blessed Alan and to others such as St Louis Marie de Montfort, St Bernadette, and the little seers at Fatima. Research beyond this short article may see Blessed Alan referred to as ‘Alanus de Rupe’, the name by which he was known in his convent.

At the beginning of his special, personal ministry he transferred to Lille and in 1464 to Douai (where William Allen founded the English College just over a century later). It was here in this year that he received a further instruction from Our Lady, which involved promoting the Confraternity of the Rosary, originally established by St Dominic, but over the years almost forgotten. This was, of course, during the aftermath of an earlier pandemic, the Black Death which had raged across Europe. The Confraternity involved a simple agreement that a person, from whatever social background (a great gift for the illiterate and the poor), would say so many rosaries per week, perhaps only three. The two major prayers of the Rosary (Psalter), then as now, were those already said for generations: the Pater Noster and the Ave.

The Our Father was known from the outset through scripture - the vital gift from Our Lord’s own mouth in response to a disciple’s request that He teach them how to pray (Lk 11:2). The Hail Mary had also evolved from the Gospels, the angelic salutation, and the divinely inspired greeting of Elizabeth on her cousin’s visit. The addition of the word ‘Jesus’ after ‘womb’ is generally accredited to Pope Urban IV about 1262, some forty years after St Dominic’s death.

The crucial and didactic point about the gift of the Rosary to St Dominic was the structuring of these prayers in a specific format and their use as a weapon to combat the spreading heresy of the Albigensians. It was this that Fr Dominic Guzman had been fighting against, and fearing he was losing the battle he prayed fervently to Our Lady to help him succeed. After three nights of solid prayer, she told him he would triumph by means of her Psalter and the method of saying it which he was to teach. For this reason, the term St Dominic’s Rosary is sometimes used, with justification and the endorsement down the ages of numerous popes. One of the best books on the Rosary is by Robert Feeney (The Rosary – The Little Summa), in which he states this Marian gift was made at Prouilhe in 1208, the place of the first unofficial and only recently established Dominican community, formed of a group of nuns converted from Albigensianism.

Much of what we know about Dominic and the origin of the Rosary is given to us by de la Roche. St LouisMarie de Montfort refers to him often in his little classic The Secret of the Rosary, calling each of the fifty beads a Rose and dedicating the fourth to Blessed Alan.

Which raises the question of the use of the term ‘Rosary’. Briefly it can mean a rose-garden which can relate to a place where one walks to pray or something generally of great promise or riches, or a garland or wreath of roses, in turn linking to a crown or chaplet, which both derive from the Latin ‘corona’. The symbolism of the beauty, the fragrance, the thorns, the red and white colours, the ‘mystical rose tree’ is very much a part of the simple or elaborate aid to prayer.

There is a reference in an anonymous poem of 1213, after the Battle of Muret (near Toulouse) when the Albigensian forces were physically as well as spiritually defeated, to Dominic bringing roses to confer upon Our Lady (Dominicus rosas afferre/ dum incipit tam humilis/Dominus coronas conferre…). However, it would appear that Dominic used the word ‘psalter’ in his teaching as did Blessed Alan, though the term ‘rosary’ was certainly used by his confreres, as when Fr James Sprenger OP followed Blessed Alan’s lead by setting up the Cologne Confraternity of the Rosary in 1474.

A development of the original confraternities of St Dominic by Blessed Alan is that people now signed up to promise to pray a number of rosaries each week. A practice followed down the centuries. But of much more importance was the nature of the rosary that Blessed Alan taught. Mary had instructed Dominic to pray and preach her psaltery of 15 Pater Nosters and 150 Aves. This remained the essential structure, gradually divided into sets of one and ten beads. However, largely through St Bernadine of Siena, the second part of the Hail Mary had been added, such that like the Our Father it formed a salutation followed by petition. The Salve Regina as we know today, through the refinement of the 11th century prayer by St Bernard, was also said. Moreover a further very important development in part owes its origin to a Carthusian monk, Dominic of Prussia (died 1460) who would add short references to each Ave, such as ‘Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem.’ In so doing he was beginning the notion of meditating upon aspects of Christ’s life and ministry, though the term ‘mysteries’ would be introduced after Blessed Alan’s time by a fellow Dominican, Alberto de Castello in 1521 (as later would the Glory Be, quite possibly by St Louis-Maris de Montfort). De Castello also structured the rosary into three sets of five Pater Nosters and 50 Aves that he called ‘The Incarnation of Christ’, ‘The Passion of Christ’ and ‘The Resurrection of Christ’, which would later become the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries.

So, it was by the re-establishment of the Confraternity, the consolidating of the prayers of the Psalter of Jesus and Mary into the meditative structure we know today, and particularly his zeal in promoting it, that Blessed Alan de la Roche has become a towering figure in the history of this most special prayer. In the words of St Louis-Marie de Montfort, “ever since he re-established this devotion, the voice of the people, which is the voice of God, called it the Rosary.”