History
From Our Lady of Victory to Our Lady of the Rosary
The feast of 7 October
Pius V (Antonio Ghislieri, 1504–1572) was a Dominican friar before he became pope in 1566. In thanksgiving for Lepanto he established an annual commemoration of Our Lady of Victory on 7 October, the anniversary of the battle. He died the following spring, on 1 May 1572, and was canonized in 1712. This portrait by Bartolomeo Passarotti's workshop, painted early in his reign, shows the austere friar in papal red.
In 1573 his successor, Gregory XIII, renamed the commemoration the feast of the Holy Rosary, to be kept on the first Sunday of October in churches with a Rosary altar or confraternity. After another victory over Ottoman forces, at Petrovaradin in 1716, Clement XI extended the feast to the whole Church. In 1913 St. Pius X fixed it on 7 October, where it remains today as the memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary.