Today, the day after the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, we observe the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. This serves as just one more example of how beautiful a gift is the liturgical calendar. It is a reminder about how important it is for us to let the liturgical seasons, solemnities, feasts, and memorials give shape and form to our spiritual lives.
While it is no longer obligatory to observe them, the week after the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the Church still has Ember Days. Ember weeks occur four times a year in conjunction with Ash Wednesday, Pentecost, and, in the wintertime, the Memorial of Saint Lucy. Following the pattern of Holy Week, Ember Days are Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Because they are penitential days, we observe these days by fasting and abstaining as well as praying more intensely and engaging in charitable activities.
A Marian devotion that is not much practiced by English-speaking Catholics in the United States is the Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows of Mary. This devotion has been around since the fifteenth century. This Chaplet has its own set beads similar to a Rosary.
The Chaplet has seven sets of seven beads. After invoking a Sorrow, like one invokes a Mystery of the Rosary, you recite a prayer and then say one Our Father followed by seven Hail Marys. You repeat this seven times. Let’s not forget that, in biblical terms, seven is the number of fulfillment or completion. Like the Most Holy Rosary, there is a way to begin and end the Chaplet.
Seven Swords Piercing the Sorrowful Heart of Mary in the Church of the Holy Cross, Salamanca, Spain
What are the Blessed Mother’s Seven Sorrows?
1. St. Simeon’s ProphecyPraying the Seven Sorrows Chaplet allows us to meditate on these sorrows and grow in our feelings of empathy for our Blessed Mother's sufferings. This devotion also open us to becoming more empathetic towards the suffering of others and learn to better understand our own sufferings and is a way of offering them up for the Kingdom of God.
2. The Flight into Egypt
3. The Loss of Jesus in the Temple
4. The Meeting of Mary and Jesus on the Way to Calvary
5. The Crucifixion and Death of Jesus
6. The Piercing of the Side of Jesus, and His Descent from the Cross
7. The Burial of Jesus
To Saint Bridget of Sweden, to whom our Blessed Mother mystically entrusted the Seven Sorrows Chaplet, were also revealed four principal graces and seven promises. Like the instructions on how to properly pray the Seven Sorrows Chaplet, I will leave it to anyone interested to explore these further. One of the principal graces is to have impressed on your mind remembrance of Christ’s passion.
“The martyrs endured their torments in their bodies; Mary suffered Hers in Her soul,” wrote Saint Alphonse Liguori, a Doctor of the Church. Continuing, he noted that “as the soul is more noble than the body, so much greater were Mary’s sufferings than those of all the martyrs.” Then, quoting another Church Doctor, “St. Catherine of Siena: ‘Between the sufferings of the soul and those of the body there is no comparison,’”1 meaning the suffering of the soul is greater. Thus, is expounded the first sorrow, which is also set forth in today’s Gospel.
The other Gospel that may be read for today’s Memorial is from Saint John.2 It is the passage in which the Lord, dying on the Cross, gives the beloved disciple to her as a son and her to him as a mother. In this, the Blessed Virgin Mary becomes our Blessed Mother. Sisters and brothers, let us be good children of so kind, so merciful, so tender and caring a mother.
1 The Devotion of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, pg 4. The Fatima Center. ↩
2 See John 19:25-27.↩
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