PrayTheRosary Apostolate

Russians Pullout of Austria, 1948

       After World War ll, the Allies turned over Catholic Austria to communist Russia. For three years the Austrian people endured this tyranny. Then, a Franciscan priest, Father Petrus, remembered how the Christians although greatly outnumbered had defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto through the Rosary, and he launched a Rosary crusade. Through it 70,000 people, one tenth of the Austrian population, pledged to say the Rosary daily for the Soviets to leave their country. Austria was valuable to the Russians because of its strategic location, rich mineral deposits and oil reserves. Yet on May 13, 1955, the anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady at Fatima, the Russians signed the agreement to leave Austria, and they did so without one person being killed and without one shot being fired. It is the only time that the militant atheistic forces of Marxism have ever peacefully left a country in which they held power. Military strategists and historians are baffled as to why the Russians pulled out. But we are not - it was the power of the Rosary.

  - "Our Glorious Faith and How To Lose It" by Fr. Hugh Thwaites, S.J.