IN FESTO SEPTEM DOLORUM BEATAE MARIAE VIRGINIS
15 SEPTEMBER 2015
The Pietà of William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1876
COMPASSIO PASSUM EST
COMPASSION IS SUFFERING: not some vague form of sympathy, but entering into the pain of the other and allowing it to enter you, undiluted and undiminished from the pain of the sufferer because no single part of this, the Body of Christ His Church, suffers alone, but always as one with Him who suffered first, and she, whose heart was pierced as His was lanced.
That Christ suffered for us is known well, but in the midst of our own suffering we often forget that, as He took our flesh and suffered in our flesh, He suffers with us too. For inasmuch as in His death He takes upon Himself the penalty of death imposed on all mortal flesh, so also in His suffering has He taken upon His flesh every affliction that mankind has known, and lifts it with His own to His Heavenly Father for the sanctification of the world.
His Passion is compassion in its fullest sense because His suffering, although His own in the flesh, was the passion of all men of all time. Every scourge bit with the pain of all humanity’s sin, and in His passing was the agony of every man’s rightful death.
Hide not, then, from suffering, but embrace it in true compassion with the suffering of Christ: a compassion modeled on His own and that of our Blessed Mother, whose sorrow, prophesied by Simeon, was grief for the whole world which she saw in the torn flesh of her Son – a grief that did not just break her heart but impaled it with the dolor of one who would die in that instant to end the pain but was spared to suffer with us, until, from sorrow, breaks forth beauteous joy.
May we, every day of our lives, stand at the foot of the Cross with the Blessed Virgin, and ask for the grace to be as compassionate as she – that we may feel the force of those nails driven into our own flesh; the sting of the sweat on those open wounds; the lungs' futile gasp for breath as the lance rends the heart – that we may desire death with her Son, and yet live, to unite our suffering with hers on that day and His on our altars, in hope of the resurrection and for the salvation of His people.