Rosary feast: at Cana, Our Lady says 'Do whatever he tells you'

ROME, October 7, 2026 AD — The Church keeps the memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary today. Those who pray the Rosary hold one scene from the lives of Jesus and his mother in mind while they say ten Hail Marys. One of those scenes is the wedding at Cana in Galilee. When the wine ran out there, the Blessed Virgin Mary told her Son, and then she told the servants to do whatever he said.

Until 2002 AD the Rosary had three sets of mysteries: the joyful, on Jesus’s birth and childhood; the sorrowful, on his Passion; and the glorious, on his Resurrection. That year Pope St. John Paul II added the five mysteries of light, so that those who pray the Rosary would also meditate on Jesus’s public life, from his baptism in the Jordan to the institution of the Eucharist. Cana is the second of them. The Gospels mention Mary only briefly in the years when Jesus was preaching. In the letter that added the new mysteries, Pope St. John Paul II wrote: “In these mysteries, apart from the miracle at Cana, the presence of Mary remains in the background.”

The feast goes back to the Christian fleet’s victory at Lepanto on October 7, 1571 AD. Pope St. Pius V ordered that Our Lady of Victory be remembered on that day every year. In 1573 AD Pope Gregory XIII renamed the feast for the Rosary.

The wedding took place “on the third day,” at Cana in Galilee. The mother of Jesus was there, and Jesus and his disciples had been invited. Then the wine ran out, and Our Lady said to her Son: “They have no wine.”

Jesus answered his mother: “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”

After that answer, Our Lady said to the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.”

Six stone jars stood nearby, kept for the Jewish rites of purification, and each held twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus told the servants, “Fill the jars with water,” and they filled them to the brim. He told them to draw some out and take it to the steward of the feast, and they did.

The steward tasted the water. It had become wine. He did not know where it had come from, but the servants who had drawn the water knew. The steward called the bridegroom and said to him: “Every man serves the good wine first; and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.”

It was the first of Jesus’s signs. He “manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

Saint Alphonsus Liguori wrote that when Our Lady told her Son the wine had run out, she was “compassionating the distress and mortification of that family.”

As he closed his 1974 AD letter on devotion to Mary, Pope St. Paul VI wrote: “Let the very words that she spoke to the servants at the marriage feast of Cana, ‘Do whatever he tells you’ (Jn. 2:5), be a seal on our Exhortation.”

Twenty-eight years later, Pope St. John Paul II wrote that the first sign at Cana “clearly presents Mary in the guise of a teacher, as she urges the servants to do what Jesus commands.” He wrote that her sentence to the servants “forms the Marian foundation of all the ‘mysteries of light’.” He tied it to the first of those mysteries, the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan: “The revelation made directly by the Father at the Baptism in the Jordan and echoed by John the Baptist is placed upon Mary’s lips at Cana, and it becomes the great maternal counsel which Mary addresses to the Church of every age: ‘Do whatever he tells you.’”