When Pope Leo XIV visits Pompeii, Italy, on May 8, the one-day trip will highlight the legacy of St. Bartolo Longo, whose dramatic conversion, influential writings, and promotion of the Fifteen Saturdays of the Most Holy Rosary devotion left a lasting mark on the city.
Ahead of the papal visit, Seek What Is Above, an initiative encouraging “people to lift their minds and hearts to God,” has released a new version of the Fifteen Saturdays with the hopes of reintroducing “the forgotten Marian devotion.”
The devotion is a series of 15 meditations on the mysteries of the rosary derived from the writings of Longo, who promoted the prayer by publishing a book with the same title in the late 1800s.
Longo, canonized by Pope Leo XIV on Oct. 19, 2025, developed a powerful devotion to the Blessed Mother after he was brought back to the Catholic faith following many years as a Satanic “priest.”
Following his intense conversion, Longo devoted his life to spreading the fruits of the rosary and played an instrumental role in establishing the Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii.
“Bartolo really popularized the Fifteen Saturdays devotion through the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii,” Dominican Father Joseph-Anthony Kress told EWTN News. “It started when he met a noblewoman who had a … pamphlet translated from French that discussed the Fifteen Saturdays.”
Using the mysteries of the rosary, the devotion encourages “a 15-week spiritual journey,” Kress, the promoter of the holy rosary for the Province of St. Joseph, explained. “Every Saturday you dedicate to one of the 15 mysteries of the rosary, and you meditate on that mystery for the rest of the week.”
Inspired by it, Longo then expanded on the original pamphlet in his book.
“He compiled all of the Scripture quotations and citations pertaining to each of the mysteries so that they would be collected in one place for … the individual praying, so itʼd be easier for them to enter into the mysteries in their totality,” Kress said.
Seek What Is Above’s new edition provides both written and image-based meditations with a series of paintings from St. Paul’s Church, a historic Dominican church in Antwerp, Belgium.
The 15-week-long devotion “encourages us to approach the rosary focused on the mysteries themselves,” Kress said. It also “encourages the reception of the Eucharist on each Saturday as well as confession as a part of the structure to make sure that youʼre spiritually prepared.”
St. Bartolo: ‘Apostle of the Rosary’
On the feast of Our Lady of Pompeii, Pope Leo will visit the Shrine to Our Lady of the Rosary and the Chapel of Blessed Bartolo Longo, which houses Longo’s relics and remains. The Holy Father will also celebrate Mass in the city’s central square — Piazza Bartolo Longo.
While there is now a lasting presence of the saint in Pompeii, Longo was not always a strong example of the Catholic faith. He lived during the late 19th century when the Church was fighting to combat the growing popularity of the occult.
Born into a devout Catholic family, Longo fell away from the faith while studying law in Naples. He began to visit some of the cityʼs infamous mediums who introduced him into the occult. His interest in the supernatural led him into Satanism and he began to preside over Satanic services, preaching blasphemously against God and the Church.
Simultaneously, Longo was struggling with anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. A university professor, Vincenzo Pepe, urged him to abandon Satanism and introduced him to his future confessor, Dominican Father Alberto Radente.
With guidance from Radente and others, Longo repented and returned to the Church but still couldn’t forgive himself or see how God could ever forgive him.
One day in Pompeii Longo despaired over his past with Satanism, but God helped him to see how he could be saved and how he could save others.
“I heard an echo in my ear of the voice of Friar Alberto repeating the words of the Blessed Virgin Mary: ‘One who propagates my rosary shall be saved,’” Longo wrote.
“Falling to my knees, I exclaimed: ‘If your words are true that he who propagates your rosary will be saved, I shall reach salvation because I shall not leave this earth without propagating your rosary,’” he wrote.
From then on he helped others “not just in their physical poverty but also in deep spiritual poverty” by “promoting the rosary,” Kress said.
“He extended himself to care for the most vulnerable in his own city, and he put his professional skill set to work for the good of the poor — being a lawyer by trade and offering free legal services to the poor who were being taken advantage of.”
Longo devoted himself to works of charity by starting orphanages and institutions for children of prisoners.
“His conversion from the spiritualisms of the day in which he lived in the occult to rejecting all of that to follow Christ and being devoted to the mother of Christ is such a moving conversion,” Kress said.
“It really speaks to the hope that we as Christians cling to, that thereʼs never a situation, never a particular life circumstance, that eliminates the hope of a conversion and union with Christ,” Kress said.
Longo became a Third Order Dominican and would return to the exact places he once participated in occult activities. There, with a rosary in his hand, he would encourage those present to reject their ways and turn to the Blessed Mother for protection.
His love for the rosary and the Blessed Mother not only led to the establishment of Marian shrines and lasting devotions but also served as inspiration for Pope John Paul II’s addition of the luminous mysteries to the rosary.
“As a true apostle of the rosary, Blessed Bartolo Longo had a special charism,” St. John Paul wrote in his 2002 apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae proposing the new mysteries.
“By his whole lifeʼs work and especially by the practice of the ‘15 Saturdays,’ Bartolo Longo promoted the Christocentric and contemplative heart of the rosary, and received great encouragement and support from Leo XIII, the ‘Pope of the Rosary.’”
Why pray the Fifteen Saturdays devotion?
The Fifteen Saturdays is a unique devotion to pray and meditate on, as it is both devotional and sacramental.
“Committing to a Fifteen Saturdays devotion may seem like a large chunk of time — itʼs a few months,” Kress said. “But it shows us that the rosary itself is, in a small sense, the summary of the Gospel thatʼs lived out over a time.”
“Itʼs treated as a presentation of the mysteries of the life of Christ and the Gospels, but … it also incorporates a sacramental life, as it incorporates the reception of the Eucharist, incorporates confession, alongside mental prayer,” Kress said.
It portrays “that our life with Christ isnʼt just this private secluded thing that we do in these interiors, but we join together in the public worship of the Church in the sacraments,” he said.
“The greater sacramental life that we live fuels our mental prayer and our contemplation” and “disposes us to a more worthy reception of the sacraments,” Kress said.
“Then on a human level, I think it helps us to live in the gift of perseverance.”
“This isnʼt just a quick fix. It takes a little bit of a commitment,” Kress continued. “But it slowly unfolds and allows the grace of God to nourish and nurture our souls over the course of time.”
“So we grow in the virtue of hope and grow in the grace of perseverance by pursuing such a devotion like the Fifteen Saturdays,” he said.
