St. Dominic in the Forest of Toulouse
Attribution: from the book De Dignitate Psalterii by Blessed Alan de la Roche.
Seeing that the weight of people's sins was blocking the conversion of the Albigensians, St. Dominic withdrew into a forest near Toulouse and prayed for three days and three nights, weeping and doing hard penance to turn aside the anger of God, until at last his strength gave out and he sank down exhausted.
The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him then, with three angels, and asked, "Dear Dominic, do you know which weapon the Blessed Trinity wants to use to reform the world?" When he answered that she knew far better than he did, she told him that the great weapon was her Psalter, the Rosary, and that if he wanted to reach those hardened souls he should preach it.
He rose up on fire with zeal and went straight to the cathedral. Unseen hands rang the bells, the people gathered, and as he began to preach a fearful storm broke out, the ground shook, and the sky went dark. Looking at an image of Our Lady, the terrified crowd saw her raise her arms three times, as if to call down God's justice on them unless they repented. At Dominic's prayer the storm ceased, he preached on, and almost the whole of Toulouse turned back to God.
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.
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