Cologne bishops answer broken images with a feast of Our Lady's sorrow

COLOGNE, 1413 AD — The bishops of the province of Cologne met in synod this year and put a new day into the calendars of their dioceses. It is a feast of the Compassion of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to be kept on the Friday after the third Sunday after Easter, under the title Commemoratio angustiae et doloris B. Mariae V. (the commemoration of the anguish and sorrow of the Blessed Virgin Mary). They ordered it to make amends for the crimes of the Hussites, who break images of Christ and the saints. Its object is one thing only: her sorrow during the Crucifixion and Death of her Son.

The quarrel the synod answers is being fought in Bohemia, far to the east and out of the bishops’ reach. What they can order is what is prayed and sung in their own churches, and that is what they have ordered: a day, kept every year, in honour of the Mother of God standing under the Cross.

A provincial synod is the bishops of one ecclesiastical province meeting with their metropolitan archbishop. Cologne has been a metropolitan see since 799 AD, when Liège, Utrecht, Münster, Bremen and Osnabrück were placed under it. What such a meeting enacts, it enacts for the dioceses of its own province and no others. It cannot give a feast to the whole Latin Church; only a pope can do that. A bishop in another province who wants the new day must take it up on his own authority.

The Archbishop of Cologne is Frederick III of Saarwerden, who has held the see since 1370 AD. His cathedral is not finished. The cornerstone was laid in 1248 AD, the sanctuary was dedicated in 1322 AD, and the nave was made ready for services twenty-five years ago, in 1388 AD.

The trouble began in Prague. The Hussites are the followers of Jan Hus, the preacher of the Bethlehem chapel in that city. A sentence of excommunication was pronounced against him in February 1411 AD and published on March 15 in every church there. The sentence was repeated after he attacked a papal indulgence preached in the city, and his residence was placed under interdict, a ban on the sacraments there. At the end of 1412 AD he left Prague for Austi in the south.

The devotion is older than the day. In 1239 AD the Servite friars took her sorrows, and her standing under the Cross, as the principal devotion of their order. But that was the rule of a religious order, not a day in a bishop’s calendar, and the feast did not come from them.

For the next hundred years the feast went no further than the north: before the sixteenth century it was kept in the dioceses of North Germany, Scandinavia and Scotland and nowhere else. In some places it was called Compassio (compassion), in others Transfixio (the piercing through). The date moved from diocese to diocese. In most of them it fell in Eastertide or shortly after Pentecost. In others it was fixed to a day of the month: July 18 at Merseburg, July 19 at Halberstadt, Lübeck and Meissen, July 20 at Naumburg.

Then the feast grew past what Cologne had given it. From the end of the fifteenth century it widened in several dioceses to five sorrows, running from the imprisonment of Christ to his burial, or to seven, extending over the whole life of Our Lady. Towards the end of the sixteenth century it spread into the south of Europe: to the nuns of the Annunciation in 1506 AD, to the Servite nuns of Valencia in 1600 AD, and after 1600 AD through France, on the Friday before Palm Sunday. In 1674 AD the feast was assigned to that same Friday for the whole German Empire.

On April 22, 1727 AD, Pope Benedict XIII extended it to the entire Latin Church, under the title of the Seven Dolours of the Blessed Virgin Mary — the step no provincial synod could take. The Office and the Mass kept the object the bishops at Cologne had given it: her compassion at the foot of the Cross.

A second feast, this one of the seven dolours, was granted to the Servites in 1668 AD for the third Sunday in September. The day the Church keeps now as the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows is September 15. Its Collect prays: “O God, who willed that, when your Son was lifted high on the Cross, his Mother should stand close by and share his suffering, grant that your Church, participating with the Virgin Mary in the Passion of Christ, may merit a share in his Resurrection.”