Alan de la Roche was born in Brittany about the year 1428 — tradition names Dinan and Plouër-sur-Rance in the diocese of Saint-Malo — and though some later writers claimed him for Germany or Belgium, his own disciple Cornelius Sneek testified that his homeland was Breton. He received the habit of the Order of Preachers at Dinan and made his profession there, entering the family of Saint Dominic in 1459, when he was already about thirty-one years of age, a man who had waited and then given himself wholly.
Sent to the great Dominican house of Saint-Jacques in Paris, he distinguished himself in philosophy and theology, and from 1459 he taught almost without interruption until his death: at Paris, at Lille, at Douai, at Ghent, and at last at Rostock in Germany, where he was associated with the university of Mecklenburg and, in 1473, was made Master of Sacred Theology. His academic exercise there treated the dignity of the Angelic Salutation, the Ave Maria — for even his lecture hall was a place where he praised the Mother of God. At Lille he laboured as lector and preacher until 1464 and worked with the reformed Congregation of Holland to lead the local convents back to strict observance, so that his zeal for Our Lady was matched by a zeal for religious discipline.
During these years, according to the tradition of the Order, he received the Marian revelations that shaped the rest of his life. In a vision of the Mother of God — dated by some to 1464 — he was moved to write down the Psalter of Mary, a book of meditations on the Rosary, and to gather the faithful into a brotherhood of prayer, which he called the Confraternity of the Psalter of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Virgin Mary. Its members bound themselves to pray each week a whole "psalter" of one hundred fifty Hail Marys with fifteen Our Fathers. Alan called himself the betrothed of the Blessed Virgin, and it is recorded that Our Lady appeared to him more than once; from the fifteen promises he transmitted, ranging from protection in misfortune to a high degree of glory in heaven, generations of Christians have drawn courage to take up the beads.
He made this his special mission and never rested from it. From 1468 at Ghent and from 1470 at Rostock, and on long journeys through northern France, Flanders, the southern Netherlands and the Empire, especially Saxony, he preached the Rosary with extraordinary success. In 1470 the first Confraternity of the Rosary was erected at Douai. His efforts were crowned within his own Congregation of Holland: the chapter of 1473 imposed the recitation of a Psalter of the Blessed Virgin Mary upon the lay brothers, and in the Dominican church at Frankfurt an altar was raised for the Confraternity of the Rosary. What had been kept almost exclusively within Dominican cloisters became, through him, the prayer of whole cities, and the confraternities he founded shaped the spiritual life of northern Europe.
It was Alan who handed on to the whole Church the ancient Dominican tradition that the Blessed Virgin herself had given the Psalter to Saint Dominic when he was discouraged in his preaching against the Albigensians, bidding him join her psalter to his word — a tradition Alan attributed to a vision granted him in 1460, and one that has been painted on countless altars since. From the earlier custom of fifty Hail Marys he passed to one hundred fifty divided into decades, fixing the fifteen mysteries and distinguishing them as joyful, sorrowful and glorious: the form Christians still pray today.
His mission was not without contradiction, and he met opposition before the devotion of the new Psalter received official approval. In 1475 he was again at Lille, visited his brotherhood at Douai, and finished his Apology for the Psalter of Mary, delivering it into the hands of the bishop Ferricus — the one work whose authenticity has never been doubted. He went on to Ghent and then to Zwolle in Holland, where he fell ill on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, and died on 8 September 1475, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at only forty-seven years of age. Our Lady called her herald home on her own birthday. He was buried in the choir of the Dominican church at Zwolle, the Broerenkerk.
Alan had published almost nothing in his lifetime. In the year after his death the Provincial Chapter of the Dominican Congregation of Holland ordered every prior to search diligently for his books, treatises and compilations and to send whatever was found to the Vicar General; Adrian van der Meer, superior of the Congregation of Holland, issued the first compendia in 1478. A collection of his papers, sermons, revelations and examples appeared in 1498 under the title Sponsus Novellus, printed in a Carthusian monastery, and in the seventeenth century the Dominican Johann Andreas Coppenstein published his own arrangement in five parts, Beatus Alanus de Rupe redivivus, admitting frankly in his preface that while the matter was Alan's, the form was his own. Because none of Alan's autographs survive, scholars have long disputed how much of the printed text is his; the Church has been careful about the books while never forgetting the man. Almost immediately after his death he was called Blessed, and the Order of Preachers has honoured him as such by popular acclaim, keeping his memory on 8 September, in some places on the ninth.
What remains unshaken is his fruit. Through Blessed Alan the Rosary was restored to the Christian people, and after him it took a central place in the life of the Church, so that he is rightly numbered among the great apostles of Our Lady's Psalter. He loved God by contemplating with Mary the mysteries of her Son; he loved his neighbour by pressing into their hands a prayer that even the poorest and busiest could pray, and by binding whole cities together in confraternities of intercession.
May Blessed Alan de la Roche obtain for us his own confidence in the Mother of God, and let us take up the beads today with faith, praying one decade slowly for someone who has stopped praying.
