The following comes from an October 17 Catholic San Francisco article by Valerie Schmalz:

Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone led hundreds of Catholics praying the rosary through the streets of the city in a eucharistic procession that wended past City Hall to United Nations Plaza.

“To pray the rosary is to look at Jesus through her eyes, to see him through the lens of her faith and love,” the archbishop told those gathered on the pavement a stone’s throw from Market Street under a hot noonday autumn sun Oct. 8. The rally included praying the rosary and Benediction.

The rosary rally was re-established in 2011 at the initiative of the Legion of Mary on the 50th anniversary of Servant of God, Holy Cross Father Patrick Peyton’s Family Rosary Crusade. The 1961 rosary rally drew a half million people to Golden Gate Park’s Polo Field. The annual San Francisco rally is timed for October. In 1883 Pope Leo XIII officially dedicated the month of October to the Holy Rosary.

Father Peyton was known as the “Rosary Priest” because he tirelessly promoted the powerful prayer of the rosary around the world, preaching to an estimated 28 million people over the course of his life. Father Peyton first proclaimed the phrases “The family that prays together stays together” and “A world at prayer is a world at peace.”

“The world needs Christ more than ever and his mother is the example of how we can carry him to a waiting world,” Archbishop Cordileone said in his homily at the Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral. The Mass was followed by a short period of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament and then the archbishop led the procession along some of the city’s busiest thoroughfares to United Nations Plaza.

The closest witness to Jesus is his mother, Archbishop Cordileone said. “When we pray the rosary then, we are privileged to enter into Mary’s heart and contemplate Christ with her.”