By Fr Joshan Rodrigues –
The final episode of Season 3’s ‘The Crown’ streaming on Netflix, concludes with a powerful scene between the characters of Queen Elizabeth II and her younger sister Princess Margaret. The contrast between the two couldn’t be more striking – Elisabeth a paragon of poise, steadfastness and strength, and Margaret, a simile of desolation, brokenness and fragility due to a chaotic marriage and estrangement with her husband. Elisabeth faces her younger sister who has just attempted to end her life through an overdose of medication. While Margaret expects an admonishment from her Queen, Elisabeth – in a rare revelation of emotion – tells her sister the unimaginable angst she would have suffered lest Margaret had succeeded.
The second part of the conversation, by contrast, shows Elisabeth doubting the value of her reign as Queen on the cusp of her silver jubilee as monarch. She considers herself useless and ineffective and an inconsequential figurehead of the past. It is Margaret’s turn to display wisdom; she strengthens her elder sister, saying to her, that her greatest accomplishment has been being calm, steadfast and absolutely solid as England suffered harrowing political and social upheavals in the last 25 years. Her strength has given her subjects strength; her steadfastness has given them hope. That is why she must celebrate.
October heralds the celebration of a much greater Queen – Mother of God and Queen of Heaven. And Mary is an exemplar of steadfastness in discipleship, solidity in faith and humility in the face of suffering. And when else have we experienced her strength greater than these last few months of the pandemic. While our hearts and souls ache for being deprived of the Holy Species of the Eucharist, clutching the physical beads of the Rosary has given us much-needed solace and peace. For touching the beads is akin to touching Our Lady, and through her we receive the touch of her Son.
The Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary is a celebration that has its origin not simply in a prayer, but in a battle. The Battle of Lepanto, as it would be forever called, had a great consequence on the unfolding of world history. When word reached then Pope Pius V of the victory of the Holy League, he added a new feast day to the Roman Liturgical Calendar – October 7th would henceforth be the feast of Our Lady of Victory. Pope Pius’ successor, Gregory XIII would change the name of this day to the feast of the Holy Rosary.
Our contemporary mindset may squirm uncomfortably with the Rosary having anything to do with warfare and battlefields; war and violence may be incompatible with Christian sensibilities. The Rosary today is celebrated today as a prayer of contemplation and meditation on the life of Christ. It is Mary who exhorts us to walk through the narrow door, up the rugged slopes of suffering, and onward to the resplendent light of the Resurrection. It is through the Rosary, a prayer that we hold to be so substantially Marian, that we come ever so close to the Glory of God, her Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Thumbing across the beads of the Rosary brings us the comforting embrace of a loving Mother and a hotline to God.
And yet when we look around us today, the tell-tale signs of battle are all around us. The onslaught of the virus has pushed us into the travails of battle – battle against poverty, uncertainty, the danger of being infected and losing a loved one, the helplessness of parents, the anguish of youth unable to realise their desire to work, the pangs of hunger and distress, the cries of migrants and the forgotten, the pain of the poor and the struggles of the ordinary working class. When we pray the Rosary, we pray to Our Lady for her providential intercession to help us win these battles.
The truth is that the Fallen World is in great opposition to the concord that the Creator intended between Himself and humanity. When we find ourselves in the midst of a broken world, we do not merely surrender in hopelessness, but defy everything that attempts to pull us down and away from God. We fight these battles not with arms and weapons, but with the powerful assurance of God’s love. His love was triumphant on the Cross, but there still are battles left for him to fight in all the Lepanto’s that rage within our own troubled souls, and in the current times, in society.
Christ our Lord still fights for us, with Our Lady of Victory – Our Lady of the Rosary – at his side.