Monthly Devotion: Our Lady of Sorrows

​"O all ye that pass by the way, attend,
and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow!"
- Lamentations 1:12

"The Savior to come is not only the reason of Mary’s existence, He is also her exemplar in all things. It is as His Mother that the Blessed Virgin came, and therefore as the Mother of sorrows; for the God, whose future birth was the very cause of her own birth, is to be in this world a Man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity. 'To whom shall I compare thee?' sings the prophet of lamentations: O Virgin … great as the sea is thy destruction. On the mountain of the Sacrifice, as mother she gave her Son, as Bride she offered herself together with him; by her sufferings both as Bride and as Mother, she was the co-redemptress of the human race. 

"Christ die now no more: and Our Lady’s sufferings are over. Nevertheless the Passion of Christ is continued in His elect, in His Church, against which hell vents the rage it cannot exercise against himself. To this Passion of Christ’s mystical Body of which she is also a Mother, Mary still contributes her compassion. 

​"Let us mingle our tears with Mary’s, in union with the sufferings of the great Victim. In proportion we do this during life we shall rejoice in heaven with the Son and the Mother; if our Lady is now, as we sing in the Alleluia-Verse, Queen of heaven and mistress of the world, is there one among all the elect who can recall sufferings comparable to hers?"

​- Dom Gueranger on the feast of the Seven Sorrows of Mary