St. Dominic at Carcassonne and the Fifteen Thousand Devils

Attribution: from the accounts of St. Dominic's preaching; Montfort tells it in the Tenth and Thirty-third Roses.

While St. Dominic was preaching the Rosary at Carcassonne, a heretic mocked his miracles and the mysteries of the Rosary, and his scoffing kept others from being converted. As a punishment, God allowed a great host of demons, said to be fifteen thousand, to take possession of the man.

His parents brought him to Dominic to be freed. Before the great crowd, the saint commanded the demons in God's name to answer him, and against their will they had to speak. They confessed that there were fifteen thousand of them in the man, because he had attacked the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, and that Dominic was the man they hated most in all the world for the souls he tore from them by this devotion.

When Dominic asked which of the saints in heaven they feared most, the demons wailed and begged to be spared the answer. But at the prayer of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who appeared beside him and touched the man with a golden rod, they were forced to cry out the truth: that she is mightier than all of hell, that they dread her more than all the saints together, that no soul who perseveres in her service has ever been lost to them, and that she wins even dying sinners the grace of true sorrow for their sins.

Then Dominic had the people pray the Rosary slowly, and at each Hail Mary the demons streamed out of the man in the form of red-hot coals, until he was completely free. Many heretics, shaken by what they had seen, were converted and joined the Rosary Confraternity.

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Source:

Simplified retellings of the miracle and conversion stories that St. Louis de Montfort gathered in The Secret of the Rosary, written in the early eighteenth century. These are paraphrased in plain modern prose, faithful to the substance of the traditional English translation but not word for word. Montfort himself called them "ancient but authentic stories about the holy Rosary," collected from earlier authors such as Blessed Alan de la Roche, and offered on human authority, not as articles of faith.