How Mary united both perfect sorrow and peace during the Passion
Our Lady's sorrow at the Passion was no blind grief, but a conscious sharing in God’s saving will.
Our Lady's sorrow at the Passion was no blind grief, but a conscious sharing in God’s saving will.
Editor’s Notes
The WM Review recently published an article about Our Lady of Sorrows, explaining how Our Lady consented to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and – in a subordinate way – can be said to have co-offered this sacrifice in union with him.
For this reason, Our Lady’s compassion does not mean a simple sympathy for her son. The WM Review article referred to Fr Coleridge’s comments: this present mini-series consists of the full chapter on the topic.
In this first part, Fr Coleridge tells us…
How Mary’s contemplation penetrated the Passion with the fullest light of grace and truth.
That her knowledge of God’s majesty and justice, and of Christ’s Sacred Humanity, made her sufferings deeper than any other’s.
Why her compassion, perfectly united to the will of God, excluded resentment and embraced even Christ’s enemies.
He shows us that Mary’s sorrow was no blind grief, but a conscious, willing share in the atonement.
The Compassion of Mary in General
The Mother of the King, Book IV, Chapter III
Burns and Oates, London, 1886
Our Lady’s intelligence of the Passion
There exist a great number of beautiful meditations and contemplations on the sorrows of our Blessed Lady during the Passion of our Lord, many of which are founded on various revelations of saints and others, who may have had preternatural communications on these great subjects.
It would be impossible, within the limits of the space at our disposal, to give anything like an epitome of these, which are in many cases exceedingly striking. It must be enough for us to remind ourselves of certain great outlines which must in any case be followed in our considerations on this part of the history of the Blessed Mother. When we have set down certain things which must always be remembered as the foundations of contemplation on this Divine subject, the manner in which details are filled in may be left very much to the character of the contemplative whom we may follow.
The intelligence of our Blessed Lady was raised, by the graces which she had received in such abundance from the very first, and which had been so continually added to during her long life, both by the free bounty of God and by what she could win by her own most faithful cooperation thereto, to the most perfect comprehension that could exist in a created being of all the great truths which lie at the foundation of all serious contemplation on the Passion of our Lord.
That is to say, she had a most perfect intelligence of the greatness and majesty of God, as well as of the other attributes which were called into exercise in the mystery of the Sacred Passion, of His ineffable holiness, and the injuries which had been heaped upon it by the sins of all the world, of His inexorable justice, which required a condign satisfaction for those sins, of the absolute completeness of the atonement which had to be wrought by the sufferings of her Son, and of the infinite love of God in providing so marvellous a remedy, so copious a redemption, for the outrages against Himself.
Restoration of all things
Further also than this, it was the will of God, as St. Paul says, to “restore all things” in our Lord, and thus the issues of His sufferings were not to be confined to the satisfaction due to sin alone. They were to repair the vacant spaces in Heaven, as well as to renovate earth. They were to heal this life as well as secure for us the next. They were to manifest God as He had never been known before, they were to raise men to a higher level than that which they had lost, they were to be the foundation of a new Kingdom more beautiful than any that could have existed in Paradise. They were to reach throughout all eternity, and to be felt throughout all the creation of God.
The mind of our Blessed Lady was enlarged and expanded by the grace of God to that full comprehension of these great truths which was possible in any one short of God Himself. It is natural to think that that beyond and above everything else her thoughts dwelt on and were absorbed by these truths of the majesty of God, His holiness outraged by sin, the enormity of guilt thus contracted, the immensity of the satisfaction, and the cost at which it was to be exacted, as also of the incomprehensible goodness and love which provided such a remedy, and of the marvellous system, the invention of the Sacred Heart, in which that remedy was to be stored up for the benefit of untold generations.
She could follow the wisdom and mercy of God step by step, in every detail of the Passion, as well as His ineffable justice and intense hatred of sin, which did not prevent Him from showing so marvellous a love to sinners.
Her knowledge of the Sacred Humanity
Next to her thoughts concerning God would come her most wonderful knowledge of our Blessed Lord in His Sacred Humanity, the royal dignity of His Person, with all the treasures of knowledge, power, and grace stored up therein, the beauty and preciousness of His Soul and Body, the intensity of the sufferings of which they were capable, the keenness of His sensibility to pain, whether mental, moral, or physical, the searching completeness of the torments of every kind to which He subjected Himself at the bidding of the Father, the absolute dereliction to which He submitted, the entire desolation and disfigurement which then fell upon His Sacred Humanity at His death.
She could understand the minute particularity of His sufferings as well as their intense painfulness, how each one was proportioned to the sins for which He was to atone, which in their malignity and ineffable foulness, and in their outrage to God and to the purity and dignity of His own Person, were present in each pang of expiation, and formed the bitterest part of the pain by which their guilt was punished. And she could understand also how by means of the Passion the graces and beauties and dignity of that Sacred Humanity were to be communicated to men with a bountifulness so abundant and an efficacy so mighty, as to make it seem as if men would have been worse off without the sin which had been so atoned for and so repaired.
Sympathy with our Lord
We reasonably think that in the Passion Mary had that great privilege of which we have so often spoken at other times in her life, of entering into the feelings and affections of the Sacred Heart, and thus sharing His sorrows. Indeed, all this knowledge and intelligence only served to sharpen the sword by which her own heart was being pierced at each moment, on account of her incomparable tenderness and the unimaginable vehemence of her love for Him, which had swollen from the mighty force which it was when she conceived Him in her womb, to a height and depth and length and breadth of which no heart but her own was capable, by the continual exercises of immeasurable love, given and returned, during every moment of His life as her Son and of her life as His Mother.
Even in our own poor experience we learn that the hearts that can suffer the most are those that can love the most, and we must be content to leave undescribed and unfathomed that love of Mary for her Son, and of her Son for her, which was now made by God the great instrument of the crucifixion of both. There is something in the passionateness and excitement of ordinary human grief which blunts the edge of the sword, and mercifully dulls the pain which its sharpness causes. Again, in great human griefs there is often an insensibility which supervenes, and so, for a time at least, saves the victim from all that might else be suffered.
But in the sorrows of Mary for the Passion of our Lord there was neither excitement nor dulness. The sword pierced keenly, and there was no waste of pain, no dulling influence to lull the sensibility of suffering.
The Will of God
The foregoing thoughts may help us to see that our Lady met the great trial of the Passion with the eye of her soul singly fixed on God, Whose will was being worked out through all.
The Passion was to her a great judicial act for the chastisement of sin, out of which was to flow a magnificence in the elevation and enrichment of those whose sins were chastised, a glory to God, an honour and triumph and joy to the Redeemer Who suffered, such as God only could imagine and carry out. Her thought was that which was afterwards expressed by the Apostles, when they spoke of the combination against our Lord of all the powers of the world, “Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, to do what Thy hand and Thy counsel decreed to be done.”1
And we may think that the same consideration extended to her own most bitter sufferings, which were also decreed by the “hand and counsel” of the Father, as is implied in the words in which holy Simeon had spoken to her about the sword that was to pierce her own heart.
Intense pity for men
In such a view of the circumstances of the Passion, there could be but little room for any indignant complaint or resentment against the human agents who were working out the will of God. Our Lord looked on them all with the most intense pity and love, and our Lady’s thoughts and feelings concerning them must have reflected the compassion of the Sacred Heart.
The bitterest pang of the whole Passion is said to have been the despair and suicide of Judas, because they would remove him irrevocably from the number of those who might still profit by the reconciliation which their wickedness had helped to bring about through the Blood shed on Calvary. Such would be the feelings with which our Lady would regard the chief priests, Pilate and Herod, the howling mob, the false witnesses, the savages who tortured our Lord beyond the requirements of the sentence passed on Him, such as the soldiers who scourged Him, and then crowned Him with thorns and mocked Him as a pretended King.
The terrible pain of her heart left no room for anger, and the clear grasp with which she possessed the truth of the atoning character of the Sacrifice, made it easy for her to wrap round the most wanton of our Lord’s enemies the folds of her motherly compassion.
No confusion in the Passion
Thus the various incidents in the Passion, which seem to us so strange in their confusion, as if the whole band of those concerned in the Death of our Lord had gone mad, or had been handed over to be possessed by devils, were in the eyes of Mary clothed in the same character of order and swift harmonious succession as the incidents of the last evening in the Cenacle, of which we spoke in the last chapter.
Hell was indeed let loose, and worked out its malignant purpose to the full, by the hands of men who did not know what they were doing, as our Lord said. But all was exactly arranged by God. Not one single outburst of malice or outrage of savagery but was duly weighed and permitted by the justice of the Father. All fell on the Sacred Heart from His hand, and all fell on the heart of that most dolorous Mother as the choice of His most adorable and most beloved will, working out thereby His own immense and unparalleled glory, the honour of His Son, and the salvation of the human race.
And thus we understand how it is no exaggeration, that which is said by some of the Fathers, that our Lady’s heart was so perfectly united to the Divine will that, if it had been necessary for its full accomplishment, she would have helped herself in the raising her Son upon the Cross.
For no one but our Lord clung with greater devotion than Mary to that adorable will, no one but He saw in it more perfect beauty, more wonderful wisdom, more infinite compassion and mercy. No one but He saw in the sins which were thus to be wiped away more deadly foulness and more loathsome degradation of the creature made in the image of God and destined for the possession of Him hereafter. No one but He could see the value of the graces which were purchased for mankind by the sufferings of those hours in a more full and piercing light.
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The Compassion of Mary in General
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Acts iv. 27, 28.