Our Lady of the Rosary of Pompeii

Today is the day of the Supplica. Twice a year — May 8 and the first Sunday of October — at noon, in thousands of churches and homes, people recite together the prayer to Our Lady of the Rosary of Pompeii. It’s one of the most heartfelt devotions of southern Italy, and its story begins badly. Bartolo Longo was a lawyer from Apulia who, during his university years in Naples, had drifted so far from the faith that he became a priest of a spiritualist cult. He got out of it with difficulty, with the help of a Dominican, and spent the rest of his life making amends. In 1872, while managing some land in the Valley of Pompeii, he found a wretched countryside: farmers with no church, no school, nothing. He decided to bring a painting of the Madonna there. The one he managed to find in Naples was in terrible condition, bought for next to nothing from a junk dealer and carried to Pompeii on a manure cart — the detail is true, and he tells it himself. Everything grew up around that painting: the sanctuary, and above all the works for orphans and for the children of prisoners, which were the idea closest to his heart. He wrote the Supplica in 1883, while cholera was raging. It has never stopped since. The Smorfia puts the Madonna at number eight. If your name is Rosaria or Rosario, today is your name day — and in these parts it’s a name you hear everywhere.