Our Lady of Sorrows and the Seven Sorrows of Mary

“Christian piety has signalled out seven particular incidents of sorrow in her life,” says the Church’s Directory on Popular Piety (136), because “the Blessed Virgin Mary’s life was entirely lived out under the sign of the sword.” Here they are with the Gospel texts behind them.

1. The prophecy of Simeon (Luke 2:34–35). Forty days after the birth, in the Temple, the old man blesses the child and then turns to his mother: “Yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” It is the sorrow that announces the others.
2. The flight into Egypt (Matthew 2:13–14). Herod is looking for the child to kill him, and Joseph is told in a dream to rise “and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt.” They leave by night, as refugees.
3. The loss of the child Jesus in the Temple (Luke 2:41–51). Three days of searching Jerusalem for a twelve-year-old. Her words when they find him are the only ones she speaks in any of the seven: “Behold, your father and I were anxiously looking for you.” Luke adds that “his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.”
4. Meeting Jesus on the way to Calvary. This one is not in the Gospels. Luke records that “A great multitude of the people followed him, including women who also mourned and lamented him”; the Church’s tradition places his mother among them, and keeps the meeting as the fourth Station of the Cross.
5. Standing at the Cross (John 19:25–27). “But standing by Jesus’ cross were his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” From the Cross he gives her to the beloved disciple and the disciple to her: “Woman, behold, your son!” and “From that hour, the disciple took her to his own home.”
6. Jesus taken down from the Cross (Mark 15:46; John 19:38–40). The Gospels say Joseph of Arimathea took the body down; the image of the mother receiving her son, the Pietà, is the Church’s meditation on that moment rather than a line of the text.
7. The burial (John 19:41–42). “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden,” with a new tomb in it, and they laid him there because the Sabbath was coming.

These are not the five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, which follow Christ from the agony in the garden to the crucifixion. The seven sorrows follow his mother, from a warning in the Temple when he was a baby to a stone rolled across a tomb.

September 15 is the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, the day after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The pairing is the whole point. The Catechism reads the Cross through her: her union with her Son was “made manifest above all at the hour of his Passion,” when “there she stood, in keeping with the divine plan, enduring with her only begotten Son the intensity of his suffering” (CCC 964, quoting the Second Vatican Council).

The history is two feasts that became one.

• The older feast began at a provincial synod of Cologne in 1413 and kept Mary’s sorrow at the crucifixion only. Benedict XIII extended it to the whole Latin Church in 1727, on the Friday before Palm Sunday.
• The Servites, the Order of the Servants of Mary, founded by seven men of Florence who withdrew to Monte Senario in the thirteenth century, were granted a feast of all seven sorrows in 1668, on the third Sunday of September. Pius VII extended it to the whole Latin Church in 1814, after his return from exile under Napoleon.
• In 1913 Pius X moved the September feast to the fixed date of September 15. In 1969 the Lenten feast was removed from the general calendar as a duplicate, and the Stabat Mater became optional.

The Friday before Palm Sunday is still kept as the Friday of Sorrows in a number of Catholic countries, and in the traditional Latin rite.

The Stabat Mater opens with the mother standing by the Cross:

Stabat mater dolorosa
Juxta crucem lacrimosa
Dum pendebat filius

The sorrowing mother stood weeping by the Cross while her Son hung there. The first words come from the Latin of John 19:25, and a few lines later the sword of Simeon passes through her soul. The hymn has ten double stanzas, and its author is unknown. It has been credited to Innocent III and to the Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi, who died in 1306; the Catholic Encyclopedia judged those the only probable candidates and doubted both.

It was sung in procession by the end of the fourteenth century and entered the Roman Missal in 1727. Today it is the optional sequence of the Mass of September 15. There are more than sixty English translations; Edward Caswall’s is the one most hymnals use. Palestrina, Pergolesi, Haydn, Rossini and Dvořák all set it to music.

Searches ask for the most famous quote from Our Lady of Sorrows. In the Gospels she says almost nothing in any of the seven. Her one line is to the boy found in the Temple, quoted above. The line most remembered from the Cross is not hers at all but her Son’s, entrusting her to us.

The chaplet belongs to the Servites, who took up the sorrows of Mary standing under the Cross as the principal devotion of their order in 1239. The beads are seven groups of seven, often black, each group marked by a small medal of one sorrow, with three extra beads at the start for her tears.

1. Make the sign of the Cross and an act of contrition.
2. Announce the first sorrow, the prophecy of Simeon, and take a moment with the Gospel text for it (above).
3. Pray one Our Father and seven Hail Marys, keeping the sorrow in mind. Some close each group with “Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary pray for us.”
4. Repeat for each of the seven sorrows in order.
5. Finish with three Hail Marys in honour of Mary’s tears, and the closing prayer below.

It is about the length of a five-decade Rosary. It can also be spread over a week, one sorrow a day, which is how many people first pray it. The closing prayer is the one printed in the nineteenth-century Raccolta, the Church’s collection of indulgenced prayers, addressed to Christ:

Search for this devotion and you will meet lists of promises. The seven graces said to have been promised to St. Bridget of Sweden in the fourteenth century. Four promises St. Alphonsus Liguori relates in The Glories of Mary (1750), reportedly revealed to St. Elizabeth of Hungary. And the graces associated with the apparitions at Kibeho, Rwanda, where Marie-Claire Mukangango said in 1982 that the Virgin had taught her the Rosary of the Seven Sorrows; the local bishop declared the apparitions worthy of belief in a declaration the Holy See published in 2001. Some versions end with a line like “you shall obtain whatever you ask for.”

Two things are true at once. The Church has approved the devotion, and Kibeho in particular, and the Rosary of the Seven Sorrows is a sound prayer of repentance. And the Church teaches that private revelations “do not belong … to the deposit of faith” (CCC 67): they add nothing to what Christ revealed and bind no one. No devotion obtains whatever is asked, and treating one as though it must is what the Catechism calls superstition, attributing the efficacy of prayer “to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand” (CCC 2111).

The better reason to pray the sorrows is the one the Church gives: they lead to Christ. The sorrows of Our Lady, the Directory says, are caused by the rejection of her Son (137). To stay with her at each one is to stay with him.

This is what most people come to Our Lady of Sorrows for. Three of the seven sorrows are a mother watching her son die, holding his body and burying him, and the devotion has been, for centuries, the place Catholics bring the death of a child. The Directory on Popular Piety says the faithful see in her “the personification of all mothers throughout the ages who have mourned the loss of a son” (145).

She does not offer an explanation, and the Gospel does not give her one. She stood there. If you are carrying a loss like this, you do not have to pray well or feel anything; you can simply stand with her. For more, see a prayer for grief and Bible verses for grief.

Grief this heavy can become more than grief. If it has become a danger to you, please reach out now:

Grief, above all. But the list of seven is broader than death, and each sorrow has its own people.

• Simeon’s prophecy: parents given a hard diagnosis, and anyone living with bad news that has not yet arrived.
• The flight into Egypt: refugees, migrants, and families forced out of their homes.
• The loss in the Temple: parents of a missing child, or of a child who has walked away from home or from faith.
• The road to Calvary: anyone watching someone they love suffer and unable to help.
• The Cross, the descent and the burial: the dying, the bereaved, and those who keep vigil at a deathbed.

The Servite St. Peregrine, healed of a cancer of the leg according to his order’s tradition, is prayed to for the sick; see the St. Peregrine novena. And because her sorrow is always sorrow over her Son, the devotion leads back to the Mother of God and to him.