Stabat Mater: An Introduction

As the end of Lent draws near, it is a good time to gather on a Sunday afternoon in this church, this place built, set apart, and used for the worship of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit- to enter together into a prayer. The word “oratorio” has come to have almost an exclusively secular meaning, referring to a certain type of musical composition. While oratorios typically take up religious themes, though not always, I think it bears noting this afternoon that oratio is the Latin word for prayer.

Stabat Mater is short for Stabat Mater dolorosa. Translated from Latin this phrase means- “The sorrowful Mother was standing.” Who is this mother? Where is she standing? And why is she full of sorrow?

The mother is the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, our Blessed Mother. She is standing beneath her Son as he hangs on the cross. This is why she is sorrowful. It is fundamental to Christian belief and for Christian practice that Christ truly died on the cross. His death was real death, not and illusion or mere appearance. We must reject the docetic heresy that our Lord only seemed to die.

If you look at the south, west, and north walls of the church, you will see the Stations of the Cross. Indeed, virtually every Catholic church is adorned with its own Stations. While this is devotion can be done at any time, during Lent the Stations of the Cross is supercharged. Gathering together on Fridays of this sacred season, the day of our Lord's Passion, the community walks these Stations together. It is a tremendously effective way of bearing our own crosses and helping others bear theirs.

Exactly who originally composed the words of the Stabat Mater is something of a mystery. For a long time, it was believed that it was composed by the Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi, who died 1306 or even by Pope Innocent III, who died ninety years earlier. Both these theories have largely been discredited. There are certainly available any number of in-depth studies on the history of this text in various languages.

The earliest copies of the text of the Stabat Mater we possess are found in a thirteenth century Gradual, or prayerbook, used by a convent of Dominican nuns in Bologna, Italy. We know that by the end of the fourteenth century the Stabat Mater was in wide use throughout the Church.

Giovanni Pergolesi’s musical setting of the text of the Stabat Mater, which he completed in 1736, remains the most popular of the several extant musical compositions of this beautiful meditation on the Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The beauty and depth of Pergolesi’s composition, I believe, is attributable, at least in part, to the fact that he composed it during the final weeks of his life. He died, aged 26, in March 1736 from tuberculosis. There can be little doubt of the very personal nature of his musical masterwork.

The Stabat Mater was so widely used that over the course of a few centuries it began appearing in Missals of various Latin Rites that existed prior to the Council of Trent. Specifically, the Stabat Mater was used as a sequence for the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent suppressed this, and many other lengthy sequences, from the Roman Missal. It was restored to the Roman Missal as a sequence by Pope Benedict XIII in 1727.

With the Second Vatican Council’s reform of the liturgy and of the Church’s liturgical calendar, which features far fewer sequences, not to mention fewer feasts of Our Lady, the Stabat Mater, while suitable for liturgical and devotional use, is no longer part of the Church’s official liturgy. Until its revision after the Second Vatican in the late 1960s, the Stabat Mater was printed in the Breviary for devotional use by the clergy.

This afternoon, the Stabat Mater will be performed in its original Latin. But looking at the first English translation, made by the Anglican priest Edward Caswall in the mid-nineteenth century, who, instead of an awkwardly literal translation of the kind to which we’ve grown far too accustomed today, his dynamic translation preserves the rhyming scheme of the Latin original. Using Caswall’s translation, this beautiful oratorio begins:

At the Cross her station keeping,
Stood the mournful Mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last…

The whole oratorio is a prayer to Christ through the Blessed Virgin. To Jesus through Mary is a most expedient passage. So, in addition to reciting the first stanza of the Stabat Mater, it seems fitting to also recite its next-to-last stanza as a nice way to end my introduction and to frame what we are about to hear. In the penultimate stanza we hear:

Christ, when Thou shalt call me hence,
Be Thy Mother my defence,
Be Thy Cross my victory