Tag Archives: Our Lady of Sorrows

On Contrition

Church, Conscience, Divine Mercy, Mercy, Sacraments, Sin, , , , , , ,

If you are a “chalice is half-full” kind of person, you might be able to find a silver lining in the Sacramental suppression that the Church has to endure thanks to, what one Prelate has called, the “dictatorship of the sanitary”.  With ready access to the Sacraments, there is always the danger of them becoming mere formalities.  It is, after all, hard to do things well when we do them regularly.  The optimist sees this as a way to overcome this temptation. 

Regular Confession is a good example of this.  There are many of us who go to Confession regularly, yet rarely see the kind of growth that we would expect from these regular encounters with Our Lord.  When access becomes limited, we are forced to examine both our desire and our real motives.  In the case of Confession that desire and motivation are one and the same thing—Contrition.

When the Confessionals were sealed, the faithful were instructed to make an act of perfect contrition and go to Confession when they could.  Thanks to bad Sacramental Theology and poor catechesis over the past half century, hardly anyone knows what that means, let alone how to do it.  That is why it behooves us to examine the topic of Contrition more closely in hopes that this great gift will grow in our hearts.

What is Contrition?

Contrition is the grief of soul brought about by the hatred of sins committed and marked by the resolution to avoid them in the future.  This “grief” is primarily effective, that is, it is an act of the will to leave our sins behind and run into the embrace of the Father.  It need not be affective to be true contrition, although often we will feel sorrow or even have tears.  This internal grief may express itself in words through prayers like the Act of Contrition, but no mere lip service will do.  Furthermore, true contrition is always a supernatural gift because it is based on a supernatural motive, namely a love of God.  Because it is based on this motive, it must also be universal in that it covers not just a sin, but all our sins.

The supernatural motive of love of God occurs in degrees.  We may love God for what He can give us or help us avoid.  This mercenary love is still love, even if it is imperfect.  Out of this love comes imperfect contrition or attrition.  This is a sorrow for sin based on the loss of heaven or the fear of hell.  What makes this imperfect is that it is still tinged with self-love.  When our love is completely focused on God and we experience sorrow for our sin then it will always be based the fact that we have offended God, independent of any benefits He might bestow upon us.  This is perfect contrition.  Although we might not be aware of it, we make this distinction every time we pray the tradition Act of Contrition when we “detest our sins because of Your just punishments [attrition] but most of all because You are all Good and deserving of all my love [perfect contrition].” 

We might be tempted to think that an act of Perfect Contrition is impossible.  But God does not command the impossible.  Instead He makes it possible through the gift of grace.  Perfect contrition, while outside of our natural grasp, may be bestowed upon us if we ask.  St. Charles Borromeo, no stranger to Sacramental crises brought on by pandemics, offered us what he called the “Three Visits” in order to prepare our souls for the gift of perfect contrition.  The first two visits, one to Heaven and one to Hell, are meant to stir up imperfect contrition.  We should meditate both on what we risk losing and what we are gaining so as to be sorry for our sins.  The third visit is to the foot of the Cross to look upon the sufferings of Jesus all brought about by your sins.  He says to stay there until you are sorry for the pain you have caused Our Lord.  In so doing you have made an act of Perfect Contrition.

“Perfect” contrition then might be a somewhat of a misnomer in that it makes it seem like you have to love God perfectly, rather than loving the God Who is perfect.  The Scholastics avoid the terms perfect and imperfect contrition and instead use contrition for the former and attrition for the latter.  This distinction helps us to grasp that contrition may occur in degrees, degrees that are proportional to our charity.  We need not be St. Mary Magdalene, whose sins were forgiven because “she loved much” and wiped Our Lord’s feet with her tears, but there can be no contrition without some degree of charity.  We need not be anxious if we struggle to make such acts, but only ask God to bestow upon us that great gift.

Contrition and Confession

If an act of contrition then forgives sins, even mortal sins, then what is the connection with Confession?  Contrition may have the same effect as Confession, but its effects are not independent of the Sacrament.  Contrition may be sorrow expressed, but Confession is sorrow received.  Even if we may an act of perfect contrition in response to mortal sin, we must still go to Confession before we can receive the Eucharist.  Perfect contrition then is an extraordinary means of forgiveness provided that we avail ourselves of the ordinary means, Sacramental Confession. 

The advice to “make an act of perfect contrition until you can get to Confession” that has been given during the pandemic is very dangerous without all of the proper qualifications.  A person, no matter how hard they try, cannot make a perfect act of contrition without the necessary grace.  To act as if God always grants it immediately when it is asked for is to be guilty of presumption.  God may withhold such a gift for reasons only His loving Providence could explain.  This is why Canon Law protects the Faithful from Prelates who would withhold the Sacrament.  The Sacrament does not require that we have contrition; only attrition is needed to be valid.  As Fr. Alfred Wilson reminds us in his classic book Pardon and Peace, when we go to Confession, Christ has already confessed those sins.  He has sorrowed for them.  Your task is to supplement His perfect confession and contrition the best you can.

This connection with Christ’s confession and sorrow brings us to the whole point of contrition.  Perfect contrition comes from Christ Himself and thus is best understood as a participation in His sorrow.  This understanding is important because it takes any of the focus off us and our faults. leaves us standing squarely on the solid ground of His Mercy.  Genuine contrition is a habit then that grows out of this.

St. Therese on her death bed offers us the best example of this.  The sisters had gathered around her and were singing her praises.  She requested that they stop and instead to list her faults, not because she was worried about her humility, but because she wanted to have more reasons to praise God in His mercy.  She was quite literally filled with Contrition because she loved God.  Let us beg her intercession that during this time we might likewise receive and develop such a precious gift.

Our Lady, Queen of Martyrs

Mary, Suffering, , ,

Today, the Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.  Although this liturgical celebration goes all the way back to the late 15th Century, there are still many people who do not know about the powerful intercession of Our Lady under this title.  To foster a devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows, we need to begin by asking why a devotion to Mary is not enough.  Why must there be all these different titles for her and why do we have different feast days attached to the various titles?  Certainly it serves the practical purpose of introducing us to her.  But there is more to it than that.  Once the Church promotes a particular title for Our Lady, it gives the Faithful a right to call upon her under the specific title and to expect her to act.  This is why the four Marian dogmas, namely her Divine Motherhood (Mother of God), Immaculate Conception (Immaculata), perpetual virginity (Virgin of Virgins Our Mother), and Assumption (Queen of Heaven and Earth), each carry a title with them.  By invoking Our Lady under those particular titles we can expect her to act on our behalf in very specific ways.  In this regard Our Lady of Sorrows (Queen of Martyrs) is no different.  What makes her specific intercession under this title so important is the fact that living in this “valley of tears”, we are in need of her constant compassion.

There are some very important implications that flow from the Immaculate Conception and help us to know Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows more fully.  Recall that Mary in the Immaculate Conception was preserved from the stain of Original Sin.  Put another way, because of the grace Our Lord merited on the Cross, he redeemed His Mother before her birth.  One could then assume that the Immaculate Conception made Mary immune from pain and death since they are consequences of Original Sin.  Now this is partially true in that the pain and death that Our Lord and Our Lady suffered were not a result of Original Sin but stem from human nature itself.  It was only by grace that Adam was exempt from pain and death in the state of Original Innocence.  Both Jesus and Mary voluntarily accepted suffering and death—He in his vocation as Redeemer, she in order to unite herself with Him in her role as the New Eve.

The fact that suffering and death were in a sense voluntary for Our Lady is something we should not overlook.  By reflecting deeply upon this truth, we will fall more deeply in love with the Lord’s most precious gift to us.  It actually made her more sensitive to suffering than we could possibly imagine.  As fallen creatures we suffer from a darkening of our intellects, a weakening of our wills and our passions have the capacity to run wild.  By not inheriting a fallen human nature, Mary had perfect integrity of soul.  Her soul was perfectly ordered so that she had no ignorance, her will was always ordered to love of God, and her passions were always under the control of reason and will.  This means her emotions were more intense than ours, not less.  She was never ignorant of the evil of sin.  As the “handmaid of the Lord” her heart was always consumed by a love of God.  Our imperfection often makes us insensible to evil and our hearts are consumed by love of self.

Hidden in this is a great law in the spiritual life.  Suffering is always proportionate to one’s sanctity.  Being holy one naturally feels all things more acutely, including the evil of sin.  Mary, as the holiest of God’s creatures then carried a great weight of sorrow.  With such a perfect love of God as the One offended by sin and love of her Son Whom sin crucifies she suffered immensely. So too because she had no ignorance her sorrows were also proportionate to her intellectual enlightenment.  When we suffer we hardly know half our misfortune and in a sense become numb, whereas she was flooded with a light that was painful.

It is not without purpose that the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows follows liturgically upon the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.  Because of all we have said about Mary’s immaculate condition we can say that no one, with the exception of Our Lord could have grasped darkness of the Passion or its horrors more completely than her.  While the immensity of her suffering is virtually unimaginable, it is clear that without being given a singular grace, Mary would have died from them.  All that is required for martyrdom is the willful acceptance of suffering sufficient to cause death even if God preserves the martyr through a singular grace.  As an aside this is why the Church has revered St. John the Evangelist as a martyr even though he did not die in the caldron of boiling oil.  So too the Church considers Mary a martyr as St. Bernard says “Mary was a martyr not by the sword of the executioner, but by bitter sorrow of heart.”

This is no mere “white” martyrdom but as Queen of Martyrs her martyrdom was greater than all the “red” martyrs.  In the first place, the martyrs all had to endure sufferings of body.  Mary’s sufferings were primarily of the soul, a perfect soul whose sufferings would have spilled over into her body.  While all the martyrs suffered the torments inflicted upon them, the love of Christ made their sufferings somehow sweet.  We read in story after story of the martyrs how they were martyred in a sense of bliss.  There was none of this in Mary’s martyrdom.  She had to watch her only Son suffer—the same Son she knew to be most innocent and lovable and God incarnate.  Because of His role as Redeemer she also knew that she could do nothing to alleviate His suffering, but instead she was to suffer with Him.  We often will hide our sufferings from those we love because we do not want them to suffer watching us suffer.  This means that Mary was keenly aware that her presence on Calvary only made Jesus’ suffering worse, which in turn increased her sadness all the more.

Our Lady of Sorrows

In commenting on the anguish endured by the mother of the Maccabees who witnessed the martyrdom of her sons, St. Alphonsus Liguori says that anyone can understand that the sufferings of children are also borne by their mothers who witness it.   So Our Lady suffered all the scourges, thorns, nails and cross in her heart.  He says that “the heart of Mary became as it were a mirror of the Passion of the Son.”

Her martyrdom was also greater because it lasted the longest.  He begins not in the Passion, but in the prophecy of Simeon when he promised that a sword would pierce her soul (Lk 2:35).  From that moment on, she knew that Our Lord would be contradicted in all things.  So while Abraham suffered great anxiety for three days knowing his son was to die (Gn 22) and David for seven days (2Sam 12:14-31), Our Lady suffered in silence for 33 years knowing that her Son what to die and ignominious death.  She submitted herself to the will of God and bore all these things in the silence of her heart (Lk 2:51).  In fact when Our Lady revealed herself to St. Bridget she said there was not a moment after that point in which this knowledge did not pierce her soul—“As often as I looked at my Son, as often as I wrapped Him in His swaddling-clothes, as often as I saw His hands and feet, so often was my soul absorbed, so to say, in fresh grief; for I thought how He would be crucified. My eyes filled with tears, and my heart was tortured with grief.”

Her martyrdom did not end at the Resurrection either, but continued after as well.  Given the horrors that she witnessed she would not have wanted to see any of His Passion go to waste.  Each time she encountered someone who rejected her Son and His Church she would relive the ugliness of His Passion because the suffering for those souls would have been in vain.  This is why she is also the Mother of Mercy wanting to see the fruits of the Passion applied to as many people as possible.

Given all this, the Church gives us this day devoted to Our Lady of Sorrows so that we might show our gratitude to Our Lady by meditating upon her dolors and showing pity for her in her sorrow.  There are two principal fruits that come from this.  The first is that those who call upon Our Lady of Sorrows shall grow in true self-knowledge.  This flows directly from Simeon’s prophecy that through her sufferings “the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Lk 2:35).  Secondly, by meditating upon her sorrows we will grow in sorrow for our own sins.  Finally through our growth in the knowledge of Our Lady’s share in the sufferings of Our Lord keeps her from being seen a mere instrument but a true Mother and co-Redemptrix.

Our Lady of Sorrows, cause of our joy, pray for us!