On October 7, the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fr. Joseph-Anthony Kress, O.P., Promoter of the Rosary for the Province of St. Joseph, preached the homily at a solemn Mass at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer in New York City.

In his homily, Fr. Joseph-Anthony reflects on Our Lady’s title as Queen of Victory, from an unexpected connection to Notre Dame football and the movie Rudy to the victory at the Battle of Lepanto and the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through the Rosary.

The battles we face today may look different, but the call remains the same: to act with courage, trust in God’s providence, and reach for the beads.

Read Fr. Joseph-Anthony’s entire homily below!

I grew up in a small town in southeast Ohio, in the Ohio River Valley on the border of Ohio and West Virginia, and where I grew up, Friday Night Lights was a real thing. It was a way of life. So as the weather gets cooler at this time of year, I immediately go back to those days when, on Friday evenings, the lights would turn on and you would be at the high school football game watching it all take place.

Now, where I grew up, it was very clear: if you grew up in Ohio, you were a Buckeye fan. Scarlet and gray were the colors of your choice. But just a short drive over into West Virginia, it quickly became clear that everything was blue and gold, and the Mountaineers were the way of life over there.

I grew up slightly differently. I grew up a Notre Dame football fan. The very first Halloween costume I remember choosing was a Notre Dame football player: little yellow pants, blue jersey, gold helmet. At our high school, we were the Fighting Irish. Our victory song was the Notre Dame Victory March. Everything about where I grew up and the high school I went to was about Notre Dame and loving Notre Dame football. There was nothing better than a Saturday afternoon, turning on the TV, watching the gold helmets run out into the afternoon sunshine, and watching another victory. So it’s no surprise, then, that when I was young, I became obsessed with the movie Rudy.

I’ve watched it thousands of times. I know all of the dialogue and the back-and-forth. I remember the training montages and the fight Rudy had to put up to get through each stage of becoming a walk-on football player, painting the gold helmets and all the like. But the scene that was most poignant for me was not the one where the stadium was chanting his name and he ran out onto the field to make the tackle for the first time.

No. The thing that always had the largest punch, the largest impact, for me was right before the football team took the field. Coach Dan Devine is in the locker room giving the pregame speech to the entire team. He looks around and helps them recognize the gravity of the moment they’re about to step into, the last home football game of the year, helping them remember all the training and all the sacrifice they had put in to get to that moment.

And he says, “Savor this. Take this in. Rejoice in it. Because this will not always be the case. And for you seniors, this will be your last one.”

And as his voice kind of falls off (“Seniors, this will be your last one”), he turns and simply says, “Father, a prayer.” And out of what seems to be thin air, an older monsignor, an older priest in a Roman collar, steps into the center of all these football players in full pads, kneels down, and prays a Hail Mary for the entire team. He ends with the phrase “Our Lady, Queen of Victory,” and that entire locker room of football players, in the deepest voices they can muster, says in unison, “Pray for us.”

That’s the moment that always stuck with me: the raucous cry of those men’s voices together, crying out to heaven, to Our Lady, “Pray for us.” And then, in a moment, they run out onto the field. They tap the Play Like a Champion sign and run out into the Saturday afternoon sun with their gold helmets gleaming, just like the Golden Dome that Our Lady stands upon in South Bend, Indiana.

I love this moment because, without even realizing it, I fell in love with Our Lady of Victory. She became a kind of rallying cry for me as a young boy of four or five, ten, twelve, fifteen years old, who idolized Notre Dame football. It was always associated with Our Lady, Queen of Victory. Little did I know at the time the connection to the Rosary. I thought it was just a football superstition.

And yet Our Lady, Queen of Victory, is the feast we celebrate today. We now know it as Our Lady of the Rosary, but it is the commemoration of the victory that took place at the Battle of Lepanto.

This battle threatened the entirety of Europe, the entirety of Christendom. The Ottoman Empire was threatening to invade the Holy Roman Empire, pushing further and further to extinguish all of Christianity. And Pope Pius V, a great Dominican saint, one of our own, drew together a kind of hodgepodge, ragtag group of naval ships to go to battle, to fight on behalf of Christendom.

It was a fight that seemed overwhelming. A fight that seemed fruitless. A fight that seemed to be just going through the motions, because there was no way they could stand up to the great and almighty Ottoman fleet. And yet Pope Pius V turned to the sailors and the admirals there. He encouraged them to be courageous and to fight manfully, but also to do so under the mantle of Our Lady, to carry rosaries with them and to pray the Rosary as they headed off into battle.

And he went one step further and said, “It’s not just for you, the sailors. It is for every Christian and all of Christendom. I beg you to pray the Rosary.” And so, from little village chapels in France to grand cathedrals, the faithful gathered together to pray the Rosary.

As Pius V was praying that evening, he stood up in a prophetic moment and claimed victory, way before news of the outcome of the battle could ever have reached him.

So what we are praying for and commemorating this day is truly the victory that took place because of the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and how all of Christendom turned to her through this prayer of the Rosary.

So what we learn from the actions of Pope Pius V, from the actions of the sailors and admirals in the fleet of the Holy Roman Empire, from the prayers and actions of every single individual in Christendom who knelt and prayed the Rosary that night, is what should guide us in our current context and in this present day. God’s providence doesn’t negate our obligations to our duties. The grace of God does not extinguish human action. And human courage does not negate the need for prayer.

But our actions, our obligations, are in tune with the providence of God. Grace strengthens us in all that we are asked to do. And action without prayer is just our own human endeavor. But in this prayer of the Rosary that we pray today, and that we commemorate on this feast day, we draw all of this together and surrender it to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of our Lord, the mother of each and every one of us through our baptism.

And so, with a mother’s care, she does not turn her back on these prayers. With a mother’s love, she does not twist them against us. With a mother’s love, she embraces these prayers and gives them to her Son.

The battles we fight may not be as explicit as on that October evening over 500 years ago. But the battle is still real. The enemy is still at work, trying to invade all of Christianity and Christendom, not only to paralyze it but to extinguish it fully. That battle still remains. The fight is still on. And so we continue to act as our predecessors have: we reach for the beads. We cry out to Our Lady, not just as a smattering and scattering of individual voices, but in the unison of the Mystical Body of Christ and the joining together of the sons and daughters of God, letting our cry rise up: Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.