Alanus claimed to have experienced a vision by which it was revealed to him that the Blessed Virgin Mary had appeared to St. Dominic and gave him the Rosary as a means to combat the Albigensian movement.
Alanus de Rupe's revelation concerning St. Dominic and the Rosary was generally accepted until the 17th century when the Bollandists concluded that the account of Dominic's supposed apparition of Our Lady of the Rosary is not mentioned in any documents of the Church or Dominican Order prior to the accounts of Alanus over two hundred years later.
[2] A popular prayer card listing the promises bears the imprimatur ("let it be printed") of Patrick J. Hayes DD who was Archbishop of New York from 1919 to 1938.
It was issued after a finding of "nihil obstat" (nothing obstructs) by an archdiocesan censor who reviewed the material to determine if it contradicted Catholic teaching.
Hayes' predecessor, John Cardinal Farley, issued an imprimatur for the edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia that holds the Rosary promises as not historical.