A reflection for Tuesday within the Sixteenth Week after Pentecost — Septem Dolorum Beatæ Mariæ Virginis, II classis (15 September), with commemoration at Lauds of S. Nicomedis Martyris
Yesterday the Church lifted up the Cross. Today she lowers her eyes from the Wood to the one who stands beneath it. The order is deliberate. The Exaltation of the Holy Cross is followed, not by another triumph, but by the Mother of Sorrows, as if the Church wished to say: you have seen what the Cross is; now see what it costs to stand near it.
The Introit sets the scene before a word of explanation is offered: 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” (John 19:25). The verse that follows it is the testament of the dying Lord: Mulier, ecce filius tuus. Everything in this Mass is spoken from Calvary. Even the Epistle, drawn from a book of war six centuries before Christ, is heard as though Bethulia stood within sight of Golgotha.
I. Blessed art thou, O daughter, above all women
The Epistle (Judith 13:22, 25) is the song of the elders of Bethulia over a widow who has come back through the night carrying the head of Holofernes:
“The Lord hath blessed thee by his power, because by thee he hath brought our enemies to nought… Blessed art thou, O daughter, by the Lord the most high God, above all women upon the earth… because he hath so magnified thy name this day, that thy praise shall not depart out of the mouth of men who shall be mindful of the power of the Lord for ever, for that thou hast not spared thy life, by reason of the distress and tribulation of thy people, but hast prevented our ruin in the presence of our God.”
No Catholic can hear benedicta es tu… prae omnibus mulieribus without hearing Elizabeth’s greeting in the hill country, and the Church intends that we should. She has long read Judith as a figure of the Blessed Virgin — so much so that the antiphon Tota pulchra es, sung on the Immaculate Conception, borrows its acclamation straight from this book: Tu gloria Ierusalem, tu laetitia Israel, tu honorificentia populi nostri (Judith 15:10).
The typology is exact at three points. First, Judith is a widow, and the Fathers loved her for it. St. Jerome, in his preface to the book, commends her to the Church as an exemplum castitatis, a pattern of chastity; and St. Ambrose, in his treatise On Widows, marvels that the one who conquered the general of the Assyrians was not a soldier but a woman of fasting and sackcloth, whose weapon was sobriety and whose armour was prayer. Mary on Calvary is also, in the order of sorrow, a woman bereaved: Joseph is gone, and her Son is being taken from her.
Second, Judith strikes the head of the enemy. Here the Fathers point us back to the first promise of the Redeemer, which the Vulgate renders ipsa conteret caput tuum — “she shall crush thy head” (Gen. 3:15). St. Irenaeus, in the second century, had already set Mary opposite Eve: as the one was led astray by a word from an angel and fled from God, the other received a word from an angel and bore God, so that “the Virgin Mary might become the advocate of the virgin Eve” (Adversus Haereses V.19). Judith’s sword at Bethulia is a shadow; the heel of the Woman is the substance.
Third — and this is the point on which today’s feast turns — the elders do not praise Judith chiefly for her beauty or her cleverness. They praise her because she did not spare her soul: non pepercisti animae tuae. The Latin anima means life, but it also means soul, and the Church, setting this text beside the prophecy of Simeon, cannot help reading it in the second sense. “Thy own soul a sword shall pierce” (Luke 2:35). The Collect of the feast joins the two: Deus, in cuius passione, secundum Simeonis prophetiam, dulcissimam animam gloriosae Virginis et Matris Mariae doloris gladius pertransivit — “O God, at whose Passion, according to the prophecy of Simeon, a sword of sorrow pierced the most sweet soul of the glorious Virgin and Mother Mary.”
Judith risked her life for her people. Mary did not spare her soul.
II. There stood by the Cross
The Gospel (John 19:25-27) is brief, and every word of it has been weighed.
Stabat. She stood. St. Ambrose, who among the Fathers returns most often to this scene, will not let the verb pass: Stabat ante crucem mater, et fugientibus viris, stabat intrepida — “The mother stood before the cross, and while the men fled, she stood undaunted” (De institutione virginis 7.49). She did not faint, as later painters sometimes imagined; she did not throw herself on the ground. Ambrose continues elsewhere that she gazed with loving eyes upon the wounds of her Son, knowing that through them redemption was coming to all (Expositio in Lucam X.131-132).
But Ambrose, with a Doctor’s precision, adds a caution that every devout soul should keep. She was ready, he says, to die with her Son and to offer herself to the executioners — yet Iesus non egebat adiutore ad redemptionem omnium, “Jesus had no need of a helper for the redemption of all.” Christ alone is the Redeemer; His one sacrifice is sufficient, and nothing is lacking to it. Whatever share the Mother has in the work of redemption, she has it by His gift and in total dependence upon Him, not as a second source alongside Him.
Within that boundary the Church’s teaching is bold. Pope Benedict XV, in the apostolic letter Inter Sodalicia (1918), wrote that she so suffered with her suffering and dying Son, and so renounced her maternal rights over Him for the salvation of men, and so immolated Him as far as it lay in her power to appease the justice of God, that it may rightly be said she redeemed the human race together with Christ. Leo XIII, before him, taught in Adiutricem Populi (1895) that she stood by the Cross offering her Son to the divine justice and dying with Him in her heart. And Pius XII, in Mystici Corporis (1943), speaks of her offering Him on Golgotha to the Eternal Father together with the holocaust of her own maternal rights and love. This is why the Church calls the day a feast and not merely a lament: the Mother’s sorrow is not waste. It is joined, subordinately and wholly, to the one oblation that saves.
St. Bernard, whose sermon is read in the second nocturn of today’s Matins, says the rest better than anyone: “Truly, O blessed Mother, a sword has pierced thy soul… Wonder not, O man, that Mary is called a martyr in her soul.” And he concludes that the violence of sorrow so passed through her soul that we may, not without reason, proclaim her more than a martyr, since her compassion exceeded the bodily sufferings of the martyrs. The Communion antiphon says it in a single line: Felices sensus beatae Mariae Virginis, qui sine morte meruerunt martyrii palmam sub Cruce Domini — “Happy the senses of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which without dying merited the palm of martyrdom beneath the Cross of the Lord.”
III. Woman, behold thy son
Then the Lord speaks, and from the Cross He makes a will.
St. Augustine, in his hundred-and-nineteenth tractate on St. John, draws out two things. First, he recalls Cana, where Our Lord had said to His Mother, “Woman, what is that to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come” (John 2:4). At Cana He was about to act in His divinity, which He had not received from her. Now, says Augustine, the hour has come — the hour in which He dies in the humanity He did receive from her — and in that hour He acknowledges her. Second, Augustine offers one of his most memorable images: lignum illud ubi fixa erant membra morientis, etiam cathedra fuit magistri docentis — “that tree on which were fixed the members of the dying One was also the chair of the teaching Master.” From that chair Christ teaches filial piety, providing for His Mother when He has nothing left to give but a disciple.
And the disciple, the Evangelist tells us, “took her to his own” — accepit eam discipulus in sua. Augustine asks what John’s “own” could mean, since he had left all things to follow Christ; and he answers that it was not lands or goods but his care and duty toward her.
The Church, however, has never thought that the Lord’s words ended with John’s household. Origen — whom the Church does not number among the Fathers in the strict sense, but whose reading here was received by many who are — wrote in the preface to his commentary on this very Gospel that no one can grasp its meaning unless he has leaned upon the breast of Jesus and received Mary from Jesus to be his mother also. He notes that Christ did not say “Behold, this one also is thy son,” but simply “Behold thy son,” as though pointing to Himself; for in the perfect disciple it is no longer he who lives, but Christ who lives in him (Gal. 2:20). The beloved disciple stands at the Cross as every disciple ought to stand: so conformed to Christ that the Mother of Christ can look upon him and see her Son.
So the Seven Sorrows are not a private grief which we are permitted to observe from a respectful distance. They are the travail of a mother bringing forth children. She who bore her Firstborn without pain at Bethlehem brings forth the rest of us at Calvary with the sword in her soul. The Offertory, adapting the words of Jeremias, therefore dares to ask her to use the standing she won there: 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 for us.”
Judith, the elders said, “prevented our ruin in the presence of our God.” The Church says the same of Mary, and means it far more.
IV. The history of the feast, briefly
Devotion to the Mother’s sorrows is ancient, but its ordering into seven — the prophecy of Simeon, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the Child in the Temple, the meeting on the way to Calvary, the Crucifixion, the taking down from the Cross, and the burial — was spread above all by the Servants of Mary, the Servite Order founded at Florence in the thirteenth century. The Church kept one commemoration of the Sorrows on the Friday before Palm Sunday, and extended it to the whole Latin Church in 1727. The September feast was extended to the universal Church by Pius VII in 1814, in thanksgiving for his return to Rome after his long captivity under Napoleon — a Pope who knew something of standing fast while others fled. St. Pius X fixed it on the fifteenth of September, where it follows the Exaltation of the Cross as the Mother follows the Son. To this Mass the Church attaches one of the five Sequences kept in the Missal, the Stabat Mater.
V. The commemoration of St. Nicomedes
At Lauds the Church also remembers St. Nicomedes, a priest of Rome and martyr. The ancient tradition, preserved in the acts of Sts. Nereus and Achilleus, holds that he gave burial to the virgin martyr Felicula, was seized for it, and, refusing to sacrifice to the idols, was beaten to death with scourges weighted with lead. His body was thrown into the Tiber, recovered by a cleric, and laid on the Via Nomentana, where a basilica later stood over his tomb. The details of his acts are not all historically secure, but the cult is very old, and the Church’s placing of him beside the Mother of Sorrows is fitting: a priest who died for the charity of burying a martyr, commemorated on the day we honour the Mother who stood by the Cross and laid her Son in the tomb.
VI. A word for practice
Most of us will be spared the sword that passed through Mary’s soul. None of us will be spared the Cross. And the feast asks one thing above all: that when the Cross is raised near us — in illness, in the ruin of a hope, in the suffering of someone we love and cannot rescue — we stand. Not flee, as the Apostles did; not collapse into bitterness; not demand that the suffering be explained before we will remain. Stand, and offer.
First, examine yourself on a single point: where have I fled from a cross that stood within reach? A sick relative I avoid visiting; a sorrow in a friend I change the subject to escape; a penance I dropped when it became costly. Name the place.
Second, take Mary into your own, as St. John did. Consecrate yourself to her anew today, and let the consecration mean something concrete: a fixed daily prayer, faithfully kept, and the resolution to bring your own sorrows to her rather than nursing them alone.
Third, when suffering comes this week — and it will, in some measure — join it deliberately to the Passion of Christ through the hands of His Mother. The sorrow that is offered is not lost.
Suggested prayer: the Stabat Mater, slowly, or this ancient verse from it:
Eia, Mater, fons amoris, me sentire vim doloris fac, ut tecum lugeam.
“O thou Mother, fount of love, make me feel the force of thy sorrow, that I may mourn with thee.”
Suggested devotion: the Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows (the Servite Rosary) — one Our Father and seven Hail Marys for each Sorrow — or, if time is short, the Fifth Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary prayed with attention fixed not on the Crucified alone, but on the Mother standing beside Him.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto two of our paths. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Mass of the Seven Sorrows and the Stabat Mater within the rhythm of September, from the Exaltation of the Cross through the Ember Days. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the Blessed Virgin’s cooperation in the work of redemption — what the Popes have taught about it, and why Ambrose’s caution that Christ “had no need of a helper” is the key that keeps that teaching true.
Sancta Maria, Mater dolorosa, ora pro nobis. Sancte Nicomedes, ora pro nobis.