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I have said previously that Pope Leo XIII is known as “The Pontiff of the Rosary.” I cannot refrain from quoting a portion of the touching Encyclical which that great Pontiff directed to the Universal Church on September 8th, The Feast of Our Blessed Mother’s Nativity, 1892. Space allows me to give but a few extracts from that celebrated Encyclical, the burning words of which should sink deeply into every Catholic heart.

To show the excellence of the Rosary from its very nature. Pope Leo XIII wrote: “When in our prayers we fly to Mary, we fly to the Mother of Mercy, who is so disposed towards us that in whatever necessity we are struggling, especially in our striving after the attainment of life eternal, she is at once by our side, and indeed, quite spontaneously—without awaiting our appeal—and lavishes upon us gifts from the treasury of that grace of which she received from the beginning a full supply from God, Whose Mother she was worthy to be. . . . When, using the words of the Angel, we salute her as full of grace, and weave that repeated salutation into a wreath, it is almost impossible