The Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows and our Duty Towards our Mother
Twice during the liturgical year, the Church honors the sorrows and the compassion of Our Lady at the foot of the Cross.
The sword of sorrow predicted by the aged Simeon pierced the loving soul of the Mother of God as she stood by her agonizing Divine Son. The Stabat Mater expresses her immense compassion as she saw her sweet child in the distress and anguish of death and received His last breath. What her maternal heart suffered at the foot of the Cross earned for her the palm of martyrdom without actually dying (communion).
Pope Pius VII, who suffered greatly from revolutionary persecutions, extended the feast of the Seven Sorrows to the entire Church in 1814. St. Pius X raised it to the rank of a second-class feast in 1908.
In his letter on January 9, 1801, Pius VII wrote:
Christians surely have a duty to the Blessed Virgin Mary to honor with unceasing and affectionate zeal, as the sons of this most sweet Mother, the memory of the bitter sorrows she bore with admirable courage and invincible constancy, especially as she stood at the foot of Jesus’ Cross and offered them to the Eternal Father for their salvation. They should make this precept given by the holy Tobias to his son with regards to his mother their own: 'Thou must be mindful what and how great perils she suffered for thee in her womb' Tob. 4:4). What refuge, what consolation can we not promise ourselves and hope for from the Virgin Mary in our adversities, if we desire spontaneously to participate in her anguish and sufferings! Where could we find a more effective help in stirring up in our heart that sorrow so justly demanded by God to have mercy upon us, than in the loving and repeated meditation of Mary’s Sorrows?
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Sources: Mgr. Dubois / FSSPX.News – 9/15/2018