On Sept. 7, a crowd assembled outdoors on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, near the steps of Bond Hall.
In recent years on home football game weekends, the university's marching band performs on these steps before heading to the stadium for the game. But on this sunny Sunday afternoon, the gathering had nothing to do with football.
Catholics from the South Bend area as well as students and university officials from three local Holy Cross institutions of higher learning, came together to pray the rosary.
They also came to celebrate the life and ministry of Father Patrick Peyton (1909-1992), a Holy Cross priest, a Notre Dame graduate and sainthood candidate named "Venerable" in 2017.
Seventy-five years earlier, Father Peyton had led a much larger outdoor rosary rally on this campus. On Sunday, Oct. 22, 1950, more than 22,000 people processed across campus into the football stadium for the rally. That day, according to the South Bend Tribune, Father Peyton, then 41, told the crowd: "We do not ask for family prayer to put a burden on men and women, but to bring happiness and peace to them."
He told the stadium crowd that family prayer was the best way to strengthen home life.
For many years, Father Peyton had been urging families all around the world to pray together, and particularly, to pray the rosary together. "The family that prays together stays together" became the saying closely connected to his ministry. And, in the late 1940s and even in 1950, he believed that many families around the world were still deeply wounded by the global trauma and destruction that followed World War II.
Father Peyton's rosary mission had earned him the label of "Rosary Priest" and began in Albany, New York, soon after his ordination in 1941.
In New York, he founded the Family Rosary Crusade and was incredibly successful in harnessing the media -- radio and television -- to help promote the Gospel and prayer. Father Peyton later recruited many Hollywood movie stars -- including Loretta Young, Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly and Jack Benny -- to help him promote that message about the need for prayer.
In fact, two years before his 1950 homecoming rally at Notre Dame, Father Peyton had led a Rosary Crusade in London, Ontario. It was the first of 540 rallies held around the world during Father Peyton's lifetime. This 1948 Canadian rally was phenomenally successful. 80,000 families -- 95% of the London Diocese -- promised after the rally to faithfully pray the family rosary.
Father Peyton had been deeply committed to the rosary since his childhood days at home in County Mayo, Ireland. There, his mother gathered the family each night for the rosary, which his father led. When he and his brother Thomas followed older siblings to the United States and eventually in 1929 to the Holy Cross seminary at Notre Dame, Patrick believed that God was preparing him for a priestly ministry in the order's foreign missions.
But he suffered a nearly fatal bout with tuberculosis while at The Catholic University of America seminary in Washington. He experienced a healing which he and others saw as "miraculous" and attributed to the intercession of Mary.
However, by the time of his ordination in 1941, Father Peyton's superiors still did not feel that he was physically strong enough to serve in the foreign missions. The young priest accepted their judgment gracefully. Within a few years, however, he'd seen that there was a different way he could be a missionary. This ministry, the Family Rosary Ministry, took him and the rosary all around the world.
"So, why are we all here today?" began Holy Cross Father Peter McCormick, Notre Dame's assistant vice president for campus ministry in welcoming the crowd and as Notre Dame's 2025 rosary rally began near Bond Hall.
Father McCormick acknowledged that the Holy Cross community and the University of Notre Dame certainly wished to honor Father Peyton on this 75th anniversary of his Notre Dame rosary rally.
Father McCormick pointed out that Father Peyton's ministry had touched more than 28 million people around the world. "But Father Peyton," he said, "would not want today's spotlight to be on him. He would say that it should be on the mother of God who has gathered us here."
The event was sponsored by Holy Cross Family Ministries, founded by Father Peyton and based in North Easton, Massachusetts. It was also livestreamed for interested viewers across the country and then made available on YouTube.
Father McCormick then introduced the rally's keynote speaker, Alex Jones, CEO and co-founder of the Hallow App, an American Catholic meditation and prayer app. Jones, a 2015 Notre Dame graduate, told the crowd about his own faith journey, a journey that began with bleak assumptions about prayer.
"I used to think," he told the crowd, "that prayer was just going through the motions -- asking God for things, complaining about things, repeating the things I'd memorized as a kid. I later learned that prayer is just about love. It's about sitting and letting the Lord love you and fill you with his love so that you really have no choice but to go and share it with the world."
That transition to recognizing and rejoicing in God's love took him some time, Jones admitted. He'd lost his faith as a teenager. A spiritual director helped him to find his way back, advising him to begin three practices every day: attending Mass, praying the rosary and sitting in silence for 20 minutes.
"Gradually," he said, "change took place and I started to fall in love with God, with Mary and the rosary. I stopped praying the rosary just so that I could check it off my list. I started to allow myself to enter more deeply into the mysteries."
In 2018, Jones and two others founded the Hallow app, which offers audio-guided Bible passages, prayers, meditations and prayer practices such as "lectio divina," a spiritual reading of sacred Scripture. By February 2022, the Hallow app had been downloaded more than 2 million times and featured appearances by actor Jonathon Roumie, who portrayed Jesus in "The Chosen," as well as actor Mark Wahlberg.
"You want to know what's crazy about this app?" Jones told his Notre Dame audience. "Of the 100,000 prayers that we have on the app, the most prayed is the rosary! Those four little audio files that we recorded seven years ago when we launched Hallow. Nothing even comes close!"
Jones' remarks were then followed -- and Notre Dame's 2025 rosary rally appropriately concluded -- with the recitation of the rosary. It was led by members of the Holy Cross congregations of priests, brothers and sisters as well as by students from the local Holy Cross colleges.
