Our Lady of Sorrows

The day after the feast of the cross, we remember the one who stood beneath it. The title of Our Lady of Sorrows is based on some moments in Mary’s life told in the Gospels, which tradition has counted and fixed at seven: Simeon’s prophecy in the Temple, which tells her a sword will pierce her soul; the flight into Egypt; the loss of the twelve-year-old Jesus; the meeting on the road to Calvary; the crucifixion; the deposition from the cross; the burial. These are the seven sorrows, and from them comes the image of the Madonna with seven swords in her heart, which you see all over Italy. The devotion spread above all through the Order of the Servants of Mary, the Servites, from the thirteenth century on. The feast was extended to the whole Church in 1814 by Pius VII, just back from his Napoleonic captivity. This devotion also gave us the *Stabat Mater*, the thirteenth-century Latin text that begins “the sorrowful mother stood”: hundreds of composers have set it to music, and the version Pergolesi wrote in Pozzuoli in 1736, a few weeks before dying at twenty-six, is one of the most beautiful things ever written in Italy. The Smorfia puts the Madonna at number eight. If your name is Addolorata or Dolores, today is your name day — and in southern Italy it’s a name many people still carry.