A Novena to Our Lady of Sorrows
Stabat Mater dolorosa
The Seven Swords
The Novena Prayer
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
The seven sorrows counted in this devotion are a Servite enumeration, formalized by the Order of the Servants of Mary, founded in Florence in the thirteenth century, who became the tradition's principal promoters.
The Prophecy of Simeon
The Novena Prayer
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
The first sorrow, Simeon's prophecy that a sword would pierce her soul, is given in Luke 2:34-35, at the presentation of Jesus in the Temple forty days after his birth.
The Flight into Egypt
The Novena Prayer
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
The second sorrow, the flight into Egypt, is recorded only in Matthew's Gospel (Matthew 2:13-15), which gives no length of time for the family's exile beyond until the death of Herod.
The Loss in the Temple
The Novena Prayer
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
The third sorrow is the loss of the twelve-year-old Jesus for three days, found finally in the Temple among the teachers (Luke 2:41-50), the only story of Jesus's childhood between the infancy narratives and his adult ministry.
The Meeting on the Way
The Novena Prayer
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
The fourth sorrow, Mary meeting Jesus on the road to Calvary, has no direct scriptural source and comes instead from the Stations of the Cross, a devotional tradition that reached its familiar fourteen-station form only in the eighteenth century.
At the Cross
The Novena Prayer
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
The fifth sorrow, Mary standing at the crucifixion, is recorded in John 19:25-27, the only Gospel to place her at the cross itself rather than watching from a distance.
The Body Taken Down
The Novena Prayer
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
The sixth sorrow, Jesus's body taken down from the cross, corresponds to the thirteenth station of the cross and to the subject of the Pieta, most famously sculpted by Michelangelo in 1499.
The Burial
The Novena Prayer
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
The seventh and last sorrow is the burial of Jesus, recorded in all four Gospels, after which none of them records Mary appearing again until the community of disciples gathered to pray between the Ascension and Pentecost.
Nothing Wasted
The Novena Prayer
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
Pope Pius VII added the feast of the Seven Sorrows to the calendar of the universal Church in 1814, the year of his own return to Rome after five years of imprisonment under Napoleon.
The prayer above is the opening stanza of the Stabat Mater, a thirteenth-century hymn, in a traditional English rendering, and opens each day here. The seven sorrows are the Servite enumeration. What follows each day is a fact about one sorrow's scriptural or devotional source, one per day.
