The Life of Our Lady, told through her Sorrows, for the feast on the fifteenth day of September — II classis
Stabant iuxta crucem Iesu Mater eius, et soror Matris eius, Maria Cleophæ, et Salome, et Maria Magdalene. “There stood by the cross of Jesus His Mother, and His Mother’s sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Salome, and Mary Magdalen.” — Introit of the Mass, from John 19:25
I. A different kind of Life
Every other hagiography in this series begins with a birthplace, a family, and a boyhood. This one cannot be written that way, and it should not be. The Church does not keep this day to recount the biography of the Blessed Virgin; she has other feasts for that — the Nativity of Our Lady a week ago, the Presentation in November, the Assumption in August. Today she asks us to look at one thread running through that life from the Temple of Jerusalem to the tomb in the garden, and to see that it is not an interruption of Mary’s joy and glory but woven into both.
The feast stands, deliberately, on the day after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Yesterday the Church lifted up the wood; today she looks at the woman standing beneath it. The order is theological. The Cross comes first, and the Mother is understood in its light.
The Tradition, following the Servites, gathers the sorrows into seven: the prophecy of Simeon; the flight into Egypt; the loss of the Child in the Temple; the meeting with her Son on the way to Calvary; the Crucifixion; the taking down from the Cross; and the burial. Taken together they are a Life — a life seen from the side of the sword.
II. Et tuam ipsius animam pertransibit gladius — The Prophecy of Simeon
Forty days after the Nativity, in obedience to a Law that did not bind her, Mary carried her Son to the Temple. The old man Simeon, who had been promised that he would not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord, took the Child in his arms and sang his Nunc dimittis. Then he turned to the Mother:
“Behold this child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted; and thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.” (Luke 2:34-35)
Here the first sorrow is not an event but a knowledge. From that morning Mary carried the future inside the present. St. Alphonsus Liguori, in The Glories of Mary, dwells on precisely this: that her martyrdom was long, because it was foreseen; that every time she clothed and fed the Child, she did so knowing whose body it was and what would be done to it. Other mothers are spared the foreknowledge of their griefs. She was not.
The Collect of the day builds its whole petition on this verse: Deus, in cuius passione, secundum Simeonis prophetiam, dulcissimam animam gloriosæ Virginis et Matris Mariæ doloris gladius pertransivit — “O God, in whose Passion, according to the prophecy of Simeon, a sword of sorrow pierced the most sweet soul of the glorious Virgin and Mother Mary.” The Church reads the prophecy as fulfilled on Calvary; but it began to cut on the day it was spoken.
III. Fuge in Ægyptum — The Flight into Egypt
Scarcely had the Magi departed when the angel came to Joseph in sleep: “Arise, and take the child and his mother, and fly into Egypt: and be there until I shall tell thee. For it will come to pass that Herod will seek the child to destroy him” (Matt. 2:13).
They went by night, as refugees go. The road south lay through desert; the destination was the land from which God had once delivered His people, and to which His Son now returned as an exile. Behind them, in Bethlehem and its borders, the soldiers of Herod killed the boys of two years and under, and Rachel wept for her children.
This sorrow has a particular character. It is the grief of a mother who cannot make her child safe in the world, who must flee and be poor and depend on strangers, and who carries — with the innocent survivor in her arms — the knowledge that other mothers’ sons died in his place. The Holy Innocents are the first martyrs of the Gospel, and Mary is the first to have wept for them from the other side.
IV. Dolentes quærebamus te — The Loss in the Temple
When Jesus was twelve, the Holy Family went up to Jerusalem for the Pasch, and returning, went a day’s journey before they found the Boy was not in the company. Three days they sought Him. When they found Him at last among the doctors, His Mother spoke the only words of reproach recorded from her lips in the whole of the Gospels, and they are words of love: “Son, why hast thou done so to us? behold thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing” (Luke 2:48).
Dolentes — sorrowing. The spiritual writers have always seen in these three days a foreshadowing of the three days between the Cross and the Resurrection, when once again the Son was lost to her and hidden in His Father’s business. And they have seen in it a grief peculiar to holy souls: the experience of God’s apparent absence. Mary had not lost Him by any fault. She lost Him, as the saints lose the sensible presence of God in the dark night, so that she might seek Him, and find Him, and understand at last a little more of who He was. “And they understood not the word that he spoke unto them… and his mother kept all these words in her heart” (Luke 2:50-51).
V. Via Crucis — The Meeting on the Way to Calvary
The Gospels do not record it, but the Tradition has never doubted it, and it stands as the Fourth Station of the Cross in every church in Christendom: that Mary, who followed her Son to Golgotha, met Him on the road.
Consider what she saw. The Child she had wrapped in swaddling bands was now wrapped in blood; the head she had cradled was crowned with thorns; the body that had grown in her womb was scourged and falling beneath the beam. And she could do nothing. She could not carry the Cross; the Roman soldiers would not have permitted it, and the Father had not willed it. Simon of Cyrene was compelled to do what His Mother would have given anything to do.
This is the sorrow of helplessness before the suffering of one we love — perhaps the most common of all human griefs, and the one in which Our Lady keeps company with the greatest number of her children.
VI. Stabat Mater — The Crucifixion
Now the prophecy is fulfilled. “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother” (John 19:25).
Stabat. She stood. The Fathers fastened on the verb. St. Ambrose remarks that the Evangelist tells us she stood, and does not tell us that she wept; the Mother of the Lord kept vigil at the Cross while the Apostles fled, and gazed with a mother’s eyes upon the wounds of her Son, through which she knew the redemption of the world was being accomplished. The later medieval fashion for representing her in a swoon at the foot of the Cross — the spasimo — was resisted by serious theologians precisely because it contradicted this word. Her grief did not break her; it was offered.
From the Cross the Son spoke to her twice over, and gave her away: “Woman, behold thy son. After that, he saith to the disciple: Behold thy mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own” (John 19:26-27). The Church has always read these words as more than the provision of a widow’s lodging. In St. John, standing for all the faithful, the Lord gave His Mother to the Church, and the Church to His Mother. She who had borne the Head without pain in Bethlehem brought forth the members in anguish on Calvary.
St. Bernard, in the sermon which the Breviary reads at Matins of this feast, puts the whole doctrine into a single sentence of address: the sword truly pierced your soul, O Mother, for it could not reach His body without passing through your heart; and we rightly call you more than a martyr, since the violence of your compassion exceeded any suffering of the flesh. This is the sense of her title in the Litany of Loreto, Regina Martyrum: she died no martyr’s death, yet no martyr suffered as she did. The Communion antiphon of the Mass says it with the Church’s own tenderness: Felices sensus beatæ Mariæ Virginis, qui sine morte meruerunt martyrii palmam sub cruce Domini — “Blessed the heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which without dying earned the palm of martyrdom beneath the Cross of the Lord.”
What did she do there? She consented. The Popes before the Council spoke of this without embarrassment. Benedict XV wrote in 1918 that she so suffered and nearly died with her suffering Son, and so surrendered her maternal rights over Him for the salvation of men, that it may rightly be said she redeemed the human race together with Christ (Inter Sodalicia). Pius XII, in Mystici Corporis (1943), described her as offering her Son on Golgotha to the Eternal Father, together with the holocaust of her mother’s rights and her mother’s love, as a new Eve. The doctrine is precise and must be held precisely: all the merit of the Redemption flows from Christ alone, and Mary’s cooperation is itself His gift, subordinate and wholly dependent. But it is real. She was not a spectator of the Sacrifice. She was the first to unite her will to it.
VII. Depositio — The Taking Down from the Cross
When Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had leave to take the body, they lowered it from the Cross; and the Tradition, rendered in countless altarpieces and in the Pietà of every land, places it in the arms of His Mother.
Here is the image that has comforted the bereaved of every century. The body she had received at the Annunciation she received back at the Deposition. She had given Him to the world whole, and the world returned Him to her broken. Jeremias’ Lamentations, which the Church sings in Holy Week, belong to this hour above all: “O all ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow” (Lam. 1:12); “great as the sea is thy destruction: who shall heal thee?” (Lam. 2:13).
VIII. Sepultura — The Burial
And then even the body was taken. They laid Him in a new tomb hewn out of rock, in a garden near the place of crucifixion, and rolled a great stone to the door, and went away.
This is the last and in some ways the loneliest of the sorrows — the grief not of the violent hour but of the empty one that follows; the return from the grave; Holy Saturday. The Church has long held that on that day, while the Apostles were scattered in fear and doubt, the faith of the whole Church lived unbroken in the heart of one woman. That is why Saturday is Our Lady’s day. She alone kept watch through the silence, believing what she could not see, and waited for the third day.
IX. How the Church came to keep the feast
The devotion is as old as meditation on the Passion, but the feast has a history, and it is worth knowing.
In 1233 seven noblemen of Florence withdrew from the world to serve the Blessed Virgin, and from them grew the Order of Servants of Mary — the Servites — whose particular charism was the contemplation of her sorrows. It was the Servites who gathered the sorrows into seven and taught the faithful the chaplet of seven “Hail Marys” in seven groups; and to them, in the seventeenth century, the Holy See granted a proper feast of the Seven Sorrows in September.
Meanwhile a second feast had grown up independently. In 1423 a provincial synod at Cologne, in reparation for the outrages of the Hussites against images of the Crucified and His Mother, instituted a commemoration of Our Lady’s anguish, which became the feast of her Compassion on the Friday before Palm Sunday. Benedict XIII extended that feast to the whole Church in 1727, and it is still commemorated on Friday of Passion Week in the traditional calendar.
The September feast passed to the universal Church through suffering. Pius VII, carried off a prisoner by Napoleon and held captive for five years, returned to Rome in 1814 and, in thanksgiving for his deliverance, extended the Servite feast to the whole Latin Church, on the third Sunday of September. St. Pius X, in his reform of the calendar, fixed it in 1913 on the fifteenth of September, the day after the Exaltation of the Cross, where it has remained.
The Mass sets the Stabat Mater as its Sequence — one of only a handful of sequences the Tridentine reform preserved — that great medieval planctus long attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi. The Offertory puts on the Church’s lips the plea of the prophet, turned to the Mother: Recordare, Virgo Mater Dei, dum steteris in conspectu Domini, ut loquaris pro nobis bona — “Remember, O Virgin Mother of God, when thou standest in the sight of the Lord, to speak good things on our behalf.”
X. What the Sorrows teach
Three things, chiefly.
That love and suffering are not opposites. Mary was the most loved and most loving of creatures, conceived without sin and full of grace — and she suffered more than any. Her sinlessness did not exempt her from grief; it enlarged her capacity for it. A Christianity that treats suffering as a sign of God’s disfavour cannot account for the Mother of God standing at the Cross.
That the Christian response to sorrow is to stand. Not to deny the grief, nor to be crushed by it, but to remain — faithful, present, united to the will of God — at the place where it hurts. Stabat. Every Christian will one day be asked to stand at some cross: a child’s illness, a spouse’s death, the ruin of a work, the apparent absence of God. She has stood there first, and she stands there still, beside each of us.
That we have a Mother. “Behold thy mother.” The last gift of the dying Christ, after He had given His garments to the soldiers and His blood to the world, was His Mother. To neglect devotion to her is to leave part of His testament unopened. And because she became our Mother in sorrow, there is no sorrow that she does not understand.
Practice
Examine. Which of the seven sorrows is most like the cross you are carrying now — the foreknowledge of a coming grief, exile and insecurity, the sense that God has hidden Himself, helplessness before another’s pain, loss, or the empty silence afterward? Bring that one sorrow to her by name.
Do. Stand by someone else’s cross this week. Visit the grieving, sit with the sick, write to the one who has been bereaved. Do not try to fix what cannot be fixed; simply remain.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, in cuius passione, secundum Simeonis prophetiam, dulcissimam animam gloriosæ Virginis et Matris Mariæ doloris gladius pertransivit: concede propitius; ut, qui dolores eius venerando recolimus, passionis tuæ effectum felicem consequamur: Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patre in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum. Amen.
“O God, in whose Passion, according to the prophecy of Simeon, a sword of sorrow pierced the most sweet soul of the glorious Virgin and Mother Mary: mercifully grant that we, who reverently recall her sorrows, may obtain the blessed effect of Thy Passion: who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.”
Devote. The Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows, as the Servites teach it: an Our Father and seven Hail Marys for each sorrow, meditating on each in turn. The devotion of seven Hail Marys daily in honour of her tears and sorrows is commended by long tradition, and certain promises of grace to those who practise it are attributed to St. Bridget of Sweden. Alternatively, pray the Stabat Mater slowly before a crucifix, or make the Stations of the Cross with attention to the Fourth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth.
If you wish to go deeper: the Sacred Liturgy path treats the September feasts of the Cross and the Sorrows together, and the place of the Sequence in the Mass. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up Mary’s cooperation in the Redemption — what the pre-conciliar Popes taught, and how it stands wholly beneath the unique mediation of Christ. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path offers the Seven Sorrows chaplet as a weekly discipline.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dolorosa, Regina Martyrum, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Missale Romanum (1962), Mass of the Seven Sorrows of the B.V.M.; the Breviarium Romanum, Matins of the feast; St. Ambrose; St. Bernard of Clairvaux; St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Glories of Mary; Benedict XV, Inter Sodalicia (1918); Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi (1943); the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912), s.v. “Feasts of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary” and “Servites.” Scripture from the Douay-Rheims.