STABAT MATER
At the Cross her station keeping,
Stood the mournful mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last.
Through her heart, His sorrow sharing,
All His bitter anguish bearing,
Now at length the sword has passed.
O, how sad and sore distressed
Was that mother highly blessed,
Of the sole begotten One!
Christ above in torment hangs.
She beneath beholds the pangs
Of her dying glorious Son.
STABAT MATER
At the Cross her station keeping,
Stood the mournful mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last.
Through her heart, His sorrow sharing,
All His bitter anguish bearing,
Now at length the sword has passed.
O, how sad and sore distressed
Was that mother highly blessed,
Of the sole begotten One!
Christ above in torment hangs.
She beneath beholds the pangs
Of her dying glorious Son.
STABAT MATER.
At the Cross her station keeping,
Stood the mournful mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last.
Through her heart, His sorrow sharing,
All His bitter anguish bearing,
Now at length the sword has passed.
O, how sad and sore distressed
Was that mother highly blessed,
Of the sole begotten One!
Christ above in torment hangs.
She beneath beholds the pangs
Of her dying glorious Son.
“THE house of sorrow is always a house of love. This is what takes place in us regarding Mary’s dolors. One of the thousand ends of the Incarnation was God’s condescending to meet and gratify the weakness of humanity, forever falling into idolatry because it was so hard to be always looking upwards, always gazing fixedly into inaccessible furnaces of light. So are Mary’s dolors to her grandeurs. The new strength of faith and devotion, which we have gained in contemplating her celestial splendors, furnishes us with new capabilities of loving; and all our loves, the new and the old as well, rally round her in her agony at the foot of the Cross of Jesus. Love for her grows quickest there. It is our birthplace. We became her children there. She suffered all that because of us. Sinlessness is not common to our Mother and to us. But sorrow is. It is the one thing we share, the one common thing betwixt us. We will sit with her therefore, and sorrow with her, and grow more full of love, not forgetting her grandeurs,— Oh surely never! — but pressing to our hearts with fondest predilection the memory of her exceeding martyrdom.”
— Fr. Frederick William Faber, The Foot of the Cross, p. 85
“WHEN God imposes a cross upon a just person, he may be sure that it is a blessing to him. It may be painful at times, but the pain purifies, enriches, and sanctifies the sufferer. Heaven requires purity of soul, and the cross purifies. Jesus says ‘He that taketh not up his cross and followith Me is not worthy of Me.‘ (Math. x. — 38) Let us then carry our crosses, ever obeying the will of our divine Redeemer.”
— Rev. B.J. Raycroft, A.M., Sermons on the Stations of the Cross, Imp. 1901
“AS we see but one side of the moon, so we see but one side of God: and what can we know of what we do not see? There is no end to the variety of the disclosures of His goodness, the inventions of His compassion, and the strangeness of His yearning over His own creatures. He has striven to fix our gaze upon these, but we will not have it so. We are busiest with what He wishes us to think least of. And we neglect to ponder all those numberless signs of our Heavenly Father’s love, which are personal things between Him and ourselves; positive and sensible touches of His unutterable affection.”
— Fr. Frederick Faber, All for Jesus, or the Easy Ways of Divine Love
The Boy Martyr of Norwich
Far in the thickest wood the fair lad lies
A rosy radiance plays around his head
Tall trees rise black upon the midnight skies
Save where a silver beam reveals the dead.
Magnificat he sang at evensong
And then when music hushed and lamps were low
Alone he homeward went nor dreamed of wrong
And in the still moonlight with footsteps slow
From a dark entry sprang a Jewish horde
Like fiends around the gentle boy they stood
And, as in ages dim they slew his Lord,
Nailed to a cross his white limbs stained with blood.
But God’s sweet Mother grants him strength to bear
That fadeless diadem which martyrs wear.
—- Frederick Rolfe (1899)
THIS modern poem about St. William of Norwich commemorates a twelfth-century, English saint whose feast day is today.
According to Rev. Alban Butler, in his Lives of the Saints:
“He suffered in the twelfth year of his age . . . a little before Easter, in 1137, the Jews of that city seized and gagged him: then they bound, mocked and crucified him, in derision of Christ: they also pierced his left side.”
Let me invoke the Catholic practice of praying for the intercession of the saint of the day with a prayer of my own:
“THE Church will be punished because the majority of her members, high and low, will become so perverted. The Church will sink deeper and deeper until she will seem to be extinguished, and the succession of Peter and the other Apostles to have expired.”
— St. Nicholas of Flüe, d. 1487
“IT IS clear that the Gospel is the gradual revelation of the Cross as the key to the riddle of existence. The Cross, not stoically submitted to as an instrument of torture, but bravely accepted as an instrument of healing, destroys the obstacles that lie between man and his happiness. Salvation, in its finality, consists in the destruction of these obstacles. To be happy is to see God.”
— Fr. Edward Leen, “Why the Cross?“
“THIS is a great day, not only to man, but even to God Himself; for it is the anniversary of the most solemn event that time has ever witnessed. On this day, the Divine Word, by which the Father created the world, was made flesh in the womb of a Virgin, and dwelt among us (St. John. i. 14). We must spend it in joy. Whilst we adore the Son of God who humbled himself by thus becoming Man, let us give thanks to the Father, who so loved the world, as to give his Only Begotten Son (3 Ibid. iii. 16.); let us give thanks to the Holy Ghost, Whose almighty power achieves the great mystery. We are in the very midst of Lent, and yet the ineffable joys of Christmas are upon us: our Emmanuel is conceived on this day, and, nine months hence, will be born in Bethlehem, and the Angels will invite us to come and honour the sweet Babe.”
— Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Feast of the Annunciation
Garbiel’s Message
The angel Gabriel from heaven came
His wings as drifted snow his eyes as flame
“All hail” said he “thou lowly maiden Mary,
Most highly favored lady,” Gloria!
“For known a blessed mother thou shalt be,
All generations laud and honor thee,
Thy Son shall be Emanuel, by seers foretold
Most highly favored lady,” Gloria! (more…)
IN Ancient Rome, crucifixion was a punishment generally reserved for slaves, pirates, and those guilty of serious treason or military desertion.
Only rarely was a Roman citizen crucified, and Cicero strongly declaimed against any such thing. Crucifixion was the ultimate humiliation — and thus unworthy of a Roman. In his book, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World, John Granger Cook assembled references to crucifixion in ancient archives. He shows, against criticism of new skeptics, that it was an approved practice by Roman authorities, possibly having been copied from Carthaginians. (It is still used in some parts of the world, more than 15 centuries after Constantine banned the practice in the West.)
To be exposed to the elements, usually naked and affixed by nails or ropes to a cross- or T-shaped post, after being beaten severely, all conducted in a public place in view of anyone who cared to look — here was a death sentence that came with a powerful message: The government is almighty and is prepared to dehumanize anyone who rises against it. The same spirit animated the institution of mass slavery, the gladiatorial games and mass slaughters committed by Romans in conquered territories.
Death often came slowly for the crucified. (That’s why Pontius Pilate expressed surprise when Jesus succumbed in three hours.) Crucifixion was not just execution; it was drawn-out torture.
Though Pilate was reluctant to execute Jesus — seven times he tried to persuade his accusers against it — the quintessentially Roman practice claimed Him and for all time, the manner in which Jesus was crucified is a testament to God’s implacable enmity to the state that rules without Him and that treats the lowly as worthless animals.
Though secondary to the message of redemption, it has perhaps especial meaning for our times.
AT Legion of Men, a foreign aid worker describes his experience in Africa and why it is impossible for Africans to benefit from foreign aid in the long run. The aid worker went to Africa with liberal illusions. He left a realist. (I suggest closed captions for this video.)
Many people know the reality of Africa and blacks in the West, but “idiotic whites” are fond of their illusions.
[Reposted from July, 2018]
KYLE writes:
In studying the origins of modern Zionism I came across this account in Theodor Herzl’s collected diaries, which can be viewed in full at Archive.org. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl chronicles the life of Herzl, the “father of modern political Zionism”, and his efforts to establish the state of Israel with the assistance of banking luminaries like the Rothschild family and Jacob Schiff. Reading these diaries is essential to understanding the state of modern geopolitics and the Zionist lobbies expansive influence today.
In 1904, Herzl, with the aid of Austrian papal portraitist, Berthold Dominik Lippay, set up a meeting with Pope Pius X at the Vatican where he’d attempt to cajole the Supreme Pontiff into bestowing his blessing upon the Zionist cause. Instead, Herzl encountered a cordial, but resilient force of nature that deflected the political activists every attempt to justify a state of Israel in Palestine with the approval of papal authority. The diary entry provides a glimpse into the now alien theology of the Catholic Church of the early-twentieth century and a weary but faithful Pope, who, living up to his legendary matter-of-fact farm boy persona, made it clear that unless the Jewish people accepted Jesus Christ, the Church would continue to deny a Zionist Israel. Below is Herzl’s entry for the audience with Pius X. (more…)
“IF WE see Job sitting on a dunghill, Joseph loaded with chains in a dungeon, David reviled by Semei, –in a word, if we see a just man suffering, we immediately cry out in astonishment. How unhappy, how much to be pitied is that man! Blind mortals as we are, we call those unhappy who suffer; whilst Jesus Christ says, ‘Blessed are they that mourn.’ (Matt, v, 5.) Where is our faith? If God afflicts the just man, it is because He loves him; for, if He loved him less, He would treat him as he does the fortunate men of this world: he would permit him to enjoy the pleasures of this world, to be deluded with the world, to be perverted with the world; and the day would come when He would judge, condemn, and punish him with the world. Sufferings are the mark of the elect. Whoever shall not be stamped with this sacred character shall never enter into that kingdom which Christ gained for us by His sufferings. We are all children of Calvary. (more…)
“BUT the couching of our spiritual sight is not the only operation which the senses of our soul undergo on Calvary. All souls are hard of hearing with respect to the sounds of the invisible world. The inner ear is opened upon Calvary. The sounds of Jerusalem travel up to us through the darkness, and perhaps the sounds of labour in the gardens near. But they rise up as admonitions rather than as distractions. They come to us softly and indistinctly, and do not jar with the silence of our endurance, or the low whisperings of prayer. Least of all do they muffle the clearness of our Saviour’s words when He vouchsafes to speak. Down below, how the world deafened us by its tumultuous noises, and jaded our spirits with its multiplicity of sounds! We knew that Jesus was at our sides, and yet we could not converse with Him. It was like trying to listen, when the loud wheels are rattling harshly along the streets, when listening is no better than an unsuccessful strain, or a perplexed misunderstanding. The mere noise the world makes in its going so amazes us that it hinders our feet upon the road to heaven. It is only on Calvary that earth is subdued enough to make music with heaven; for it is there only that God is heard distinctly, while the low-lying world murmurs like a wind, a sound which is discordant nowhere, because it is rather the accompaniment of a sound than a sound itself.”
Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (or the Sorrows of Mary) (TAN Books, 1956 edition); p. 281
“[T]HE history of His Passion will reveal to us many sad secrets of the human heart and its perverse inclinations; for what happened in Jerusalem happens also in every sinner’s heart. His heart, according to the saying of St. Paul, is a Calvary, where Jesus is crucified. There is the same ingratitude, the same blindness, the same wild madness, with this difference: that the sinner who is enlightened by faith, knows Him whom he crucifies; whereas the Jews, as the same apostle tells us, knew not the Lord of glory.”
— Dom Prosper Guéranger, “Passion Sunday,” The Liturgical Year
BE not emulous of evildoers; nor envy them that work iniquity.
For they shall shortly wither away as grass, and as the green herbs shall quickly fall.
Trust in the Lord, and do good, and dwell in the land, and thou shalt be fed with its riches.
Delight in the Lord, and he will give thee the requests of thy heart.
Psalm 36: 1-4