The Rosary Church at Tsim Sha Tsui was built in 1905 with a generous donation from a Portuguese Catholic, Antonio Simplicio Gomes, M.D. His wish was to commemorate his parents by offering this church to Our Lady of Pompeii.

Pompeii was an ancient Roman town situated near Naples, Italy. With the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. the then 600-year-old town with its 20,000 more inhabitants was buried under the thick volcano ashes and forgotten for about 1700 years. Upon excavation in 1748, two-thirds of the town emerged as a witness to the lights and shadows of the Roman civilization.

The picture of Our Lady of Pompeii, also called the Queen of the Rosary (feast day on 8th May), is one meter wide and 1.2 meter high, and was previously kept in a monastery at Naples. It portrays Mary holding the baby Jesus with her right arm and the right hand of the baby Jesus is giving a Rosary to St. Dominic while Mary¡¦s left hand pointing downward, is giving St. Catherine of Siena a Rosary. A Sister of the monastery gave this picture to a young Italian lawyer, Bartolo Longo (1841-1926) who had come to Pompeii to promote the recitation of the rosary. Later Longo built a church to keep the picture which attracted people making pilgrimages from everywhere to say prayers before this picture. Many of them claimed to have witnessed miracles. Longo was later beatified in 1980 and was called a ¡§man of Mary¡¨. He held that popular piety speaks in the language of theologians in the Rosary.

The beginning of the Rosary prayer, composed of 150 Angelic salutations and 15 Our Fathers, was accredited to St. Dominic (1170-1221) in the time of the Albigensian heresy. Thereafter, the Rosary is almost inseparable from the devotion to Mary. Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585) established 7th October as the Feast of the Rosary. Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) dedicated the month of October to the Holy Rosary. Pope John Paul II (1978-2005), proclaimed 2002 as the ¡§Year of the Rosary¡¨. In that year he also added the ¡§mysteries of light¡¨ to form the fourth chaplet in addition to the traditional three chaplets. In that year, the icon of Our Lady of Pompeii was at St. Peter¡¦s Basilica, Vatican by the explicit order of the Pope.