Who is Our Lady of Sorrows?
Our Lady of Sorrows is not a different Mary. It is the Mother of Jesus seen from one angle: the woman who stood by the cross. The title rests on two Gospel moments. When Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple, the old man Simeon told her, "a sword will pierce through your own soul also" (Luke 2:35). Some thirty years later she stood under the cross while her Son died, and he gave her to the disciple he loved with the words "Behold, your mother!" (John 19:27). Early writers read Simeon's sword as her grief at the crucifixion. St. Ambrose, Franciscan Media notes, pictured her at the cross sorrowful but standing, so unafraid that "Mary did not fear to be killed, but offered herself to her persecutors."
Devotion gave her sorrows a number. The Catholic Encyclopedia lists the seven the Church's own Office names: Simeon's prophecy, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the boy Jesus in Jerusalem, meeting him on the road to Calvary, standing at the foot of the cross, receiving his body when it was taken down, and his burial. Seven swords, one for each, are the traditional image. Benedict XVI, preaching at Lourdes on this memorial in 2008, said the seven swords only suggest "the full extent of her suffering," and that Mary's "self-restraint, however, prevents us from plumbing the depths of her grief."
How the feast grew is a long story, and the sources tell it at different lengths. The Catholic Encyclopedia traces a feast of Mary's sorrows to a provincial synod of Cologne in 1413, and says the seven founders of the Servite Order had already made her sorrows at the cross their chief devotion in the 1200s, though the feast "did not originate with them." The Servites received their own feast in September in 1668. In 1727 Benedict XIII extended a feast of the Seven Sorrows, kept on the Friday before Palm Sunday, to the whole Latin Church. In 1814 Pius VII, back in Rome after his exile in France, extended the September feast to the whole Church as well, and its rank was raised in 1908. Franciscan Media gives the short version: two feasts, one from the fifteenth century and one from the seventeenth, both kept by the universal Church for a time. Today the General Roman Calendar keeps one, the memorial of September 15, the day after the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
Why Catholics pray to Our Lady of Sorrows in grief
Catholics do not go to Mary under this title because she fixed her grief. They go because she had it. She buried her Son. She stood through the hours of his dying when, as John's Gospel tells it, only a few of his followers stayed. She was given no explanation at the time. The Church has always read Simeon's sword as a real wound and not a figure of speech, and the feast, the Encyclopedia says, honors "the spiritual martyrdom of the Mother of God and her compassion with the sufferings of her Divine Son."
That is what a grieving person recognizes. A mother who has lost a child, a widow in the first weeks, someone whose loss came suddenly and without a goodbye, finds in the seven sorrows a map of her own: the dread before, the search, the meeting on the road, the standing by, the body in the arms, the grave. None of these is skipped. The devotion does not hurry from Good Friday to Easter.
The other reason is John 19. Jesus gave his mother to the disciple he loved, and Franciscan Media reads the scene as the Church always has: "As Mary mothered Jesus, she is now mother to all his followers." So a Catholic asks her not only to understand but to do what mothers do. Benedict XVI, speaking to the sick at Lourdes, said of Mary's smile that it "is for all; but it is directed quite particularly to those who suffer, so that they can find comfort and solace therein." No decree makes her the patroness of grief. There is only the plain sense of generations of mourners that this was the right door to knock on.
How to pray to Our Lady of Sorrows
Pray to her the day you need her. The memorial is September 15, and the nine days before it, September 6 to 14, are the traditional time for a novena, but grief keeps no calendar. The Mass of the day reads either John 19:25-27, Mary at the cross, or Luke 2:33-35, Simeon's sword; either passage can be read slowly at home.
The hymn below, the Stabat Mater, entered the Roman Missal and Breviary in 1727, the Catholic Encyclopedia says, for the older feast of the Seven Sorrows in Passion week; the September feast used other hymns, but the Stabat Mater has belonged to Mary's sorrows ever since. The Catholic Encyclopedia counts more than sixty English translations and says Edward Caswall's is the one most hymnals use. You do not have to sing it. Read a few stanzas, stop where it hurts, and tell her the rest in your own words.
Pair it with what the Church gives the bereaved: a Mass offered for the person you lost, Confession if guilt is tangled up with the grief, and a priest or a parish bereavement group who will let you say the same things more than once. Grief that stops you eating, sleeping or functioning for weeks is also a reason to see a doctor, and asking Mary's prayers is not a reason to wait. If you are thinking of ending your life, call emergency services or, in the United States, 988.
Mary stood. That is the whole picture of this feast. She did not understand yet, she did not leave, and the Church believes she still does not leave.