The Seven Sorrows Rosary (Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows)

The Seven Sorrows Rosary is prayed on a chaplet whose forty-nine beads fall into seven sets, one set for each sorrow, with three more beads for Mary’s tears. Many booklets, among them those from Kibeho, pray those three Hail Marys first, on the beads by the medal; the 1910 words on this page keep them for the end. The beads are often black, and some chaplets mark each set with a small medal. If you have none, an ordinary rosary or your fingers will do: what matters is the count of seven.

1. Begin. Make the Sign of the Cross and pray the act of contrition.
2. Announce the first sorrow, the prophecy of Simeon. If there is time, read its verse from the Gospel below and keep the scene in front of you.
3. Pray one Our Father and seven Hail Marys while you stay with that sorrow.
4. Go on through the other six in the same way, from the flight into Egypt to the burial of Jesus.
5. Pray three more Hail Marys in honor of Mary’s tears.
6. Close with the lines marked V. and R. and the prayer to Christ.

In all, that makes seven Our Fathers and fifty-two Hail Marys, so it takes about as long as a five-decade Rosary.

The seven sorrows of Mary run from the Temple, while her Son was still a baby in her arms, to a new tomb in a garden close to Calvary. The Gospels tell the events of six of them, though not always with Mary in view; the fourth, her meeting with him on the road, comes to us from tradition and the fourth Station of the Cross. The verses below are from the Douay-Rheims Bible, and each short meditation is our own.

1. The prophecy of Simeon (Luke 2:34–35). Simeon, who has waited all his life for this child, turns to the young mother: “And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed” (Luke 2:35). She is told the cost before any of it has come. Pray this sorrow for anyone living under news they dread.
2. The flight into Egypt (Matthew 2:13–14). Warned in a dream, Joseph “arose, and took the child and his mother by night, and retired into Egypt” (Matthew 2:14). They leave in the dark with what they can carry, for a country that is not theirs. Pray it for refugees and for every family driven from home.
3. The Child Jesus lost in Jerusalem (Luke 2:43–51). On the third day the search ends in the Temple, and his mother says: “Son, why hast thou done so to us? behold thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing” (Luke 2:48). Of all seven, this is the sorrow where the Gospel lets us hear her voice, and the word it gives her is sorrowing. Pray it for parents whose child is missing, or has drifted far from home or from faith.
4. Mary meets Jesus on the way to Calvary. The Gospels do not tell this meeting. Luke says only: “And there followed him a great multitude of people, and of women, who bewailed and lamented him” (Luke 23:27). Christian tradition puts his mother in that crowd, near enough to see him fall and unable to lift the beam. Pray it for those at a bedside who would gladly take the pain if they could.
5. Jesus dies on the Cross (John 19:25–27). “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother” (John 19:25). She stays to the end, and in his last hour he gives her the beloved disciple as a son: “Woman, behold thy son” (John 19:26). Pray it for the dying, and for everyone who keeps watch with them through the night.
6. Jesus is taken down from the Cross (John 19:34–40). John tells how “one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water” (John 19:34), and how Joseph of Arimathea came “and took the body of Jesus” (John 19:38). The Gospels do not say that he was laid in her arms; the Church’s tradition says so, as the prayer above does, and the Pietà, the mother with her dead Son across her knees, is how Christian art has kept that moment. Pray it for anyone who has held someone they loved after death.
7. The burial of Jesus (John 19:41–42). “Now there was in the place where he was crucified, a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein no man yet had been laid” (John 19:41), and Joseph “rolled a stone to the door of the sepulchre” (Mark 15:46). Then comes the long quiet of Holy Saturday, when she waits and believes. Pray it for the bereaved in the empty days after a funeral.

The Seven Sorrows Rosary is the prayer of the Servites, the Order of the Servants of Mary. The Catholic Encyclopedia tells how they began: seven young men of Florence, from leading families of the city and members of a lay confraternity devoted to the praise of Mary, were at prayer on the feast of the Assumption in 1233 when, by the order’s tradition, the Virgin appeared and asked them to give their lives wholly to God. They left the city for Monte Senario, a mountain north of Florence, took a black habit and the Rule of St. Augustine, and became the order of her servants.

Sorrow was at the heart of the order from the start. In 1239, by the Catholic Encyclopedia’s account, the founders chose Mary at the foot of the Cross as the chief devotion of their community. The count of seven came later: the seven sorrows from Simeon in the Temple to the grave are the ones their own feast kept from 1668. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912 still names “the Rosary of the Seven Dolours” (dolours being the old word for sorrows) among the Servites’ own devotions. Popes encouraged it for centuries: the Raccolta of 1910 lists indulgences granted for this chaplet from Benedict XIII in 1724 to Leo XIII in 1898.

The Seven Sorrows Rosary suits every day of the year, yet some days have long been its own. The Raccolta of 1910 singles out Fridays, the days of Lent, and the feast of the Seven Dolours with the week after it as times to say this chaplet (p. 218).

Fridays. Friday is the day of the Crucifixion, and four of the seven sorrows happened on that one Friday: the road, the Cross, the taking down and the burial. Praying the chaplet once a week, on Friday, keeps Good Friday in view all year.

Lent and Holy Week. The Directory on Popular Piety says that the Via Matris, which walks through the same seven sorrows as seven stations, suits the themes of Lent (n. 137), and it asks that Our Lady of Sorrows be remembered in Holy Week, on Good Friday (n. 145). From 1727 the Friday before Palm Sunday was a feast of her sorrows for the whole Latin Church, and it is still a fitting day for the chaplet.

September 15. The memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows is the chaplet’s own day. The Servites once kept their feast for eight days, and a September week of the chaplet is an easy way to begin.

The Stabat Mater, the medieval Latin sequence whose first words set Mary beside the Cross, makes a fitting close to the Seven Sorrows Rosary. Nobody knows who wrote it; the Catholic Encyclopedia judged Pope Innocent III and the Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi the only likely authors. It entered the Roman Missal and Breviary in 1727 for the feast of the Seven Dolours. The English below is Father Edward Caswall’s, as he printed it in his Lyra Catholica in 1849, where its three parts are sung at Vespers, Matins and Lauds.