Mary says:
“Last Saturday358 I spoke to you about my joys. Today I shall speak to you about my sorrows. I won’t explain them to you. I have already explained all of them, except one, to you.359 And I shall explain it to you soon. But I shall bring you to comprehend them in their greatest meaning.
“As each joy was not for me alone, for this would have been selfishness, so each sorrow did not hurt me for my own sake alone, but because, in bearing all of you in myself as the Mother of all believers, I have felt in myself all the wounds of your spirits. And if the joys blossomed into roses for me only when the events took place - and they lasted as briefly as the rose, for the hand of man and Satan’s breath lacerated that flowering, nullifying it for many and too soon - the sorrows were thorns nailed into my heart from the first instant and never torn out.
“That is why those painting me did not depict me with seven roses budding from my heart, but with seven swords, and if there are some encircling it with roses, they do so in such fashion that the flowery band is itself torture, for the stems are full of thorns.
“I really am the Mystical Rose and do not have thorns on my leg because I am the One Full of Grace. But in my heart are all the thorns of the human sins which deprive me of my children and which cause offense to my Jesus.
“The first sorrow was not just because of my love as the Mother of God. I knew my destiny. I knew because I was not ignorant of the destiny of the Redeemer. The prophecies spoke of his great suffering. The Spirit of God, united to me, clarified for me even more than what was said by the prophecies. From the moment I had said, ‘I am the handmaiden of the Lord,’360 I had embraced Pain together with Love.
“But how much pain to feel and already see that men would take Good, that had become Flesh, and turn Good into an Evil for themselves. In the mockery directed at Simcon,361 I saw the numberless acts of derision, the sacrilegious denials of an incalculable number of men. Jesus had come to bring peace. And men, in his name or going against his name, would have war in relation to Him and each other. All the schisms, all the heresies, and all forms of atheism were thus before me... and, like a carpet of swords, awaited me to lacerate my heart.
“The second sorrow, which I shall explain to you when the time comes, was not just because of the discomforts of flight, but was permeated with the bitterness of seeing that poor human power, which remains as long as God permits, instead of making itself a shield for true Power and becoming ‘great’ by turning into a ‘servant of God,’ through the concupiscence of power it became an assassin and deicide. It kills the innocent. That was already a great sin. But to become the killer of God was a sin beyond comparison. And if the Eternal did not so permit, that did not keep the sin from being just as operative. For the desire to do evil and the attempt at carrying it out are barely a tenth of a degree below the consummated sin.
“And yet how many of the ‘great’ from then until the end of time would imitate Herod and trample on God in order to be ‘gods.’ I thus saw these jackals, who were killing to destroy God, and together with my Son I clasped to my heart all those persecuted for the sake of the Faith and heard their holy moans intermingled with the blasphemies of the overbearing, and, unable to curse, I wept.... The road from Bethlehem to Egypt was marked by my tears.
“The third sorrow. I thus sought Jesus, who was lost, not because of my failing or that of my husband. My Child had wanted to do this to make an initial appeal to hearts and say to them, ‘God’s hour has come.’ But among the millions of beings who would exist, how many would lose God! One loses Him by one’s own fault or through his will. When Grace dies, God is then lost. When God wants to take people to a greater Grace, He then conceals Himself. In both cases there is desolation.
“The sinner dead to Grace is not happy. He seems to be. But he is not. And even if he experiences moments of elation which do not let him understand his state, hours are never lacking in which a call to life makes him feel his condition as one separated from God. And then there is desolation. The torture which God has his beloved ones experience so that they will be like his Word: saviors.
“You know what this is.362 Abandonment by God! A horror greater than death. And if it is a horror to those for whom it is only a trial, meditate on what it is to those for whom it is an authentic reality. My third sorrow was to see that many would have to drink from this chalice to perpetuate the work of redemption, and even more bitter was to see the great number who would perish in desperation.
“Oh, Maria! If only men were always able to seek Jesus! The plant of desperation would cease to secrete its poison because it would die forever.
“The fourth sorrow. I was a Mother, and to see my Child under the cross was a natural sorrow. But a greater, supernatural sorrow was to see the hatred, much more anguishing than the wood, oppressing my Son.
“How much hatred! A boundless sea! From that mob screaming blasphemies and mockery there would come, by spiritual filiation, all those hating the holy Martyr. If I had been able to take the cross away from Jesus and set it on my shoulders as a Mother, I would have suffered less than when seeing all the future crucifiers of their Savior with the eyes of my spirit. Those who attempt to abolish Him so as not to encounter his throne as a Judge and who do not know that for them He will be only a Judge and for the others a Friend.
“The fifth sword was from the knowledge that his Blood, dripping like many rivulets of salvation from his lacerated members, would always be blasphemed. And yet that Blood spoke, and speaks. It cries out with a loving voice and calls. And men have not wanted and do not want to understand it. They crowded around the Messiah to request health for their illnesses and begged Him to say a word to them. And at the moment when He did not use the touch of his finger or dust or saliva, but gave his Life and his Blood to heal them from the one, true, indelible illness – ‘sin’ - they fled from Him more than from a leper.
“And they flee from Him. ‘May that Blood fall upon us.’363 Oh, it will fall on the Last Day to call them to account for their hatred and, since they did not want to love, will curse! And am I, the Mother, not to suffer on seeing that so many of my children have deserved to be cursed and cut off forever from the spiritual family of Heaven, in which I am the Mother and my Jesus is the Firstborn and the first Brother?
“When I received the lifeless remains of my God and Son and could count his wounds one by one, I felt my womb being lacerated. Oh, I did not experience the pain of childbirth.364 But I did experience this one, and there are no mother’s labor pains which can be compared to this. All my pain as a believer and all my pain as a mother were fused into one single pain. And upon this, the base of my cross, as Calvary was of my Lord’s cross, there was Pain.
“I did not see Jesus dead in your hearts. He does not die. But your hearts dead to Him. I saw in how many hearts He would be laid out as if on cold remains. For how many He would to no avail command, ‘Rise up!’ Man who does not want to live. Who does not want to rise. The Sacrament of Life refused or received sacrilegiously even when the momcnts of your existence are numbered. The countless Judases who are unable to become worthy of receiving their wounded God by an honest conversion and who would be healed by their repentance.
“Look, Maria. Everything is preferable to being the new Iscariots. And yet it is the sin committed with the most indifference. And not by the major sinners alone. But also by many who seem to be and think they are faithful to my Son. He calls them ‘the current Pharisees.’365 You can distinguish them by their works. Contact with my Son does not make them better. But, rather, their life is the negation of Charity and thus of God. They are the dead, if not to Grace, to its fruits. They have no vitality. Jesus cannot act in them because on their part there is no correspondence.
“They are the ones who by a single degree precede those who are Christians in name only. These are desecrated temples, profaned by the rottenness of all the vices, in whom the name, only the name, of Christ remains as the body of my Jesus remained in the tomb. They, too, are lifeless. And if in Gethsemane the knowledge of all those for whom the Sacrifice would be futile was the spiritual martyrdom of my Son, on kissing Jesus in the last farewell, this vision was my agony.
“Nor does it cease. No. The swords are always in my heart because man continues to inflict upon it its seven sorrows. Until the number of the saved is completed, along with the glory of God in his blessed ones, I shall suffer in my twofold pain as the Mother seeing her Firstborn offended and as a mother seeing too many children prefer eternal exile to the Father’s dwelling.
“When you pray to me as the Lady of Sorrows, think of these words of mine. And in your sorrows eliminate all selfishness so as to imitate me. I expanded my sorrows as the Mother of Jesus for all those born. I am the new Eve. Use your sorrows for all your brothers and sisters. Take them to God. To me.”
358 May 13.
359 Especially in the dictations belonging to the major work on the Gospel.
360 Luke 1:38.
361 Mockery not mentioned in the Gospel (Luke 2:25-35), but found in Valtorta’s description of “The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple,” in the Preparation cycle.
362 Because she experimented it from April 9 on
363 Matthew 27:25.
364 See note 57, in The Notebooks. 1943.
365 For example, in the dictation on May 12-13