“And Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary his mother: Behold this child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted; And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.” — Luke 2:34–35, Douay-Rheims
It is the fortieth day. A young mother has come up to the Temple to do what the Law required of her, and she has brought the two turtledoves that the Law allowed to the poor. There is nothing remarkable about the scene. Thousands of families did the same thing every year.
Then a man named Simeon takes her son out of her arms, blesses God, and says something that no mother has ever wanted to hear at her child’s presentation. He tells her the boy will divide Israel. He tells her the boy will be contradicted. And then, almost as an aside, he turns from the child to the woman holding him and tells her that a sword is coming for her too.
The Church has never forgotten that sentence. On 15 September she keeps a feast for it.
The day after the Cross
Look at where the feast sits. The fourteenth of September is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The fifteenth is Our Lady of Sorrows. The calendar puts them back to back on purpose.
On the first day the Church lifts up the instrument of our salvation and looks straight at it. On the second day she lowers her eyes a few feet and looks at the woman standing underneath it. That is the whole logic of the feast in a sentence. It is not a detour from the Cross. It is the Cross seen from the one vantage point that no theologian can improve on, which is the vantage point of a mother watching.
Saint John records that she was there, and he records it in a single clause with no adjectives at all: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother …” (John 19:25; the verse goes on to name her sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalen). The Gospel does not tell us what she felt. It tells us where she stood. The feast exists because the Church has spent twenty centuries refusing to walk past that clause.
Seven swords, and where they came from
The devotion did not arrive fully formed. It grew, the way most Catholic devotions grow: from the bottom up, in particular places, long before Rome ever put it on a universal calendar.
A provincial synod at Cologne early in the fifteenth century established a commemoration of Mary’s anguish under the Cross. For a century it stayed a regional observance, kept in northern Germany, Scandinavia, and Scotland, and kept on no single date from place to place. Meanwhile the Servites, the Order of the Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary, founded at Florence in the thirteenth century, had taken Mary standing beneath the Cross as the governing devotion of their whole order. By the late fifteenth century various dioceses had begun counting her sorrows, some listing five and some listing seven, and extending them across her entire life rather than confining them to Calvary.
Two feasts eventually emerged from all this, and it is worth knowing that there were two, because for a long stretch the devotion turned up twice a year. Benedict XIII extended the Passiontide feast to the whole Latin Church by a decree of 22 April 1727. The second feast, granted to the Servites in 1668, was extended to the universal Church by Pius VII on 18 September 1814, shortly after his release from Napoleon’s captivity. Pius X raised it to a double of the second class on 13 May 1908, and in the calendar reform that followed it was fixed to 15 September, where it has stayed. The Passiontide feast was later reduced to a commemoration under the 1960 rubrics and then dropped from the general calendar in 1969, leaving the September feast alone.
The seven sorrows themselves, as the Matins responsories of the feast number them, are these:
- The prophecy of Simeon
- The flight into Egypt
- The loss of the child Jesus in Jerusalem
- Meeting Jesus on the way to Calvary
- Standing at the foot of the Cross
- Receiving the body of Jesus taken down from the Cross
- The burial of Jesus
Notice what that list is not. It is not seven variations on Calvary. It runs from the fortieth day of the child’s life to the sealing of the tomb, which is to say it runs the length of her motherhood. The Church is not asking us to contemplate one terrible afternoon. She is asking us to notice that the sword Simeon named took thirty-three years to finish its work.
The objection, put at full strength
Here is where an honest Catholic has to stop and let the other side speak, because the objection to this feast is not stupid and it is not always made in bad faith.
A thoughtful Protestant friend looks at Our Lady of Sorrows and sees two problems. The first is aesthetic and pastoral: it looks morbid. A whole liturgical day devoted to a woman’s grief, with a sequence about her weeping, statues of her heart run through with blades, chaplets that walk you deliberately through seven separate wounds. Christianity is supposed to be an Easter religion. Why cultivate sorrow as a devotional discipline at all?
The second objection is the serious one, and it is doctrinal. If Mary’s suffering is placed alongside her Son’s suffering, in the same frame, in the same liturgy, with the same language of offering, then something has been smuggled in. Scripture says there is “one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). It says we are redeemed by the blood of Christ, full stop. The moment you start numbering a creature’s sorrows as though they had saving weight, you have begun to build a second redeemer, whatever your footnotes say. Catholics may protest that they mean nothing of the kind, but devotions form belief faster than catechisms do, and the devotion looks like what the objection says it looks like.
That is the objection at full strength. It deserves a real answer rather than a reassurance.
The answer, and the line Rome has just drawn
Take the doctrinal objection first, because the pastoral one dissolves once the doctrinal one is settled.
The Catholic claim about Mary at the Cross is a claim about compassio, a suffering-with. It is not a claim that she contributed a second currency to the price of redemption.
We should not pretend, however, that the tradition has always spoken with that restraint. It has not, and a reader who has been in these arguments will know it. Pius X, in Ad diem illum (1904), called Mary the repairer of a lost world. Benedict XV, writing in 1918 to a confraternity dedicated to precisely this devotion, said of her suffering at Calvary that it may rightly be said that she, together with Christ, redeemed the human race. Several popes have used the title Co-redemptrix, and John Paul II used it on at least seven occasions. None of that is a Protestant caricature. It is the language of the Marian magisterium of the last century, and any honest treatment has to put it on the table.
Which is why what happened next is worth attending to closely. On 4 November 2025 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published a doctrinal note, Mater Populi Fidelis, on precisely these Marian titles. It had been approved by Leo XIV on 7 October 2025 and was signed by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and Monsignor Armando Matteo. The Note acknowledges the papal usage rather than burying it (n. 18), and then judges that “it is always inappropriate to use the title ‘Co-redemptrix’ to define Mary’s cooperation” (n. 22), on the grounds that the title risks obscuring the truth that Christ alone is Mediator and Redeemer. On “Mediatrix of all graces” it stops short of that verdict: it endorses Cardinal Ratzinger’s earlier judgment that the title is not clearly grounded in Revelation and recognises the difficulties it poses (n. 45), while continuing to allow language of a participated, subordinate mediation and of Mary’s maternal intercession (nn. 27, 38).
Some Catholics received that document unhappily, and the arguments about it are still running. But notice what it does not do, because this is the part that matters on 15 September. The same Note that declines the title affirms the reality without a flinch. It speaks of the Mother who gave the world the Author of Redemption and who “stood firm at the foot of the cross … suffering alongside her Son” (n. 32). It grounds her spiritual motherhood in her physical motherhood of the Son of God (n. 35), and it says her participation as Mother gives a unique and singular character to her cooperation in his redemptive work (n. 36). Simeon’s sword is there in the text as well (n. 12).
Now, our friend anticipated this move and blocked it in advance. He said that devotions form belief faster than catechisms do, and that pointing at a document does not answer what the practice is teaching people. He is right about that, and it should be conceded rather than argued with. It is in fact the likeliest reason the Dicastery wrote at all: not because a Protestant complained, but because the language had drifted far enough inside the Church to need correcting.
But then look at what the concession actually costs, and to whom. The objection is that Catholicism cannot tell the difference between the Redeemer and the woman standing under him, that the distinction is a footnote its devotional life quietly overruns. What happened in November 2025 is that Rome told the difference, in public, at the expense of language its own recent popes had used, and against a constituency that wanted the title defined rather than retired. A body incapable of the distinction could not have performed it. The correction is the counter-evidence.
And note precisely where the correction fell. It fell on a title. It did not fall on the feast, the sequence, the seven sorrows, or the practice of standing on 15 September and looking at a grieving mother. Rome tightened the vocabulary and left the devotion where it was, which is the clearest possible statement that the devotion was never the problem.
That also answers the charge of morbidity, because the feast is not an invitation to wallow. Simeon’s prophecy ends with a purpose clause: the sword comes “that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.” Commentators generally attach that clause to the whole oracle rather than to the sword alone, and it would be sharp practice to pretend otherwise. But the Church’s devotional reading, which takes the sword and the revealing together, is doing something defensible with the text: it treats Mary’s grief not as an end in itself but as the thing that stands next to the Cross while everyone else is being shown for what they are. The soldiers were revealed that day. The thieves were revealed. The disciples who ran were revealed, and so were the few who stayed.
The hymn that says it best, and what we do not know about it
The Stabat Mater is the most famous thing the Latin West ever produced on this subject, and it is worth being honest about its history, because the honest version is better than the tidy one.
We do not know who wrote it. The two standing candidates are Innocent III and the Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi, and neither attribution can be established. Benedict XIV favoured Innocent III; other scholars have found the case for Jacopone unsatisfactory, not least because several Latin hymns confidently assigned to him are demonstrably not his. The sequence was well known to all classes by the end of the fourteenth century. It found its way into several European missals of the fifteenth century, though not the English ones, and it was still not taken into the Roman Missal and Breviary until 1727, when the Passiontide feast was extended to the whole Latin Church.
That is a useful thing to hold on to. One of the great hymns of Christendom spent something like three and a half centuries as a poem the faithful simply loved, by an author nobody can name, kept alive in local books and private devotion, before the Roman books made room for it. Tradition is not only what is handed down from the top. Sometimes it is what the faithful would not stop singing until the liturgy caught up.
What the feast is actually for
There is a reason this particular devotion has outlived every attempt to tidy it away, and it has little to do with theological controversy.
Most people, at some point, are handed a grief they did not choose and cannot fix. Not a problem to be solved, a sorrow to be carried. The characteristic Christian temptation at that moment is to assume that faith means the sorrow should not be there, that a stronger believer would have less of it, that the grief is itself a kind of failure.
Then the Church puts a feast on the calendar for the sinless woman who watched her son die, and the accusation collapses. The holiest creature who ever lived was not spared this. She was not given a way around it, and she did not receive an explanation in advance. She was given a prophecy on the fortieth day and then thirty-three years in which to see it come true. What she did was stand there.
Stabat. She stood. Not collapsed, not fled, not absent. The verb is the whole devotion.
On 15 September the Church asks us to look at her doing it, and to notice that there is a place to stand.
References
- Luke 2:22–35, John 19:25–27, and 1 Timothy 2:5, Douay-Rheims (drbo.org). Every phrase inside quotation marks is verbatim Douay-Rheims.
- “Feasts of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV — the Cologne synod, the Servite devotion, Benedict XIII’s decree of 22 April 1727, the Servite grant of 1668, Pius VII’s extension of 18 September 1814, the elevation to double of the second class on 13 May 1908, and the list of the seven sorrows from the Matins responsories. Note: the Catholic Encyclopedia dates the Cologne synod to 1413; a number of modern reference works give 1423. We have not been able to adjudicate between them from a primary synodal source, so the text says only “early in the fifteenth century.”
- “Stabat Mater,” Catholic Encyclopedia — the disputed attribution to Innocent III and Jacopone da Todi; “well known to all classes by the end of the fourteenth century”; found in several European but not English missals of the fifteenth century; not introduced into the Roman Breviary and Missal until 1727.
- Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Mater Populi Fidelis, Doctrinal Note on Some Marian Titles Regarding Mary’s Cooperation in the Work of Salvation, 4 November 2025 (nn. 12, 18, 22, 27, 32, 35, 36, 38, 45). Approved by Pope Leo XIV on 7 October 2025; signed by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, Prefect, and Msgr. Armando Matteo, Secretary.
- On the stronger language of the earlier Marian magisterium: Pius X, Ad diem illum (1904); Benedict XV, Inter Sodalicia (22 March 1918), “ut dici merito queat, Ipsam cum Christo humanum genus redemisse”; and Mater Populi Fidelis n. 18 on previous papal use of the title, including John Paul II on at least seven occasions.
The full text of the Stabat Mater is in our prayer library, alongside more than ninety prayers of the Catholic Church.