Tuesday, August 22 : Rupert of Deutz

“Woman, this is your son. This is your mother.” By what right is the disciple whom Jesus loved the son of the Lord’s mother? By what right is she his mother? By the fact that, without pain, she brought into the world the salvation of us all when she gave birth in the flesh to the God-man. But now she is in labor with great pain as she stands at the foot of the cross. At the hour of his Passion, the Lord himself rightly compared the apostles to a woman in childbirth when he said: “When a woman is in labor she is in anguish because a child is born into the world” (cf. Jn 16:21). How much more, then, might such a son compare such a mother, the mother standing at the foot of his cross, to a woman in labor? What am I saying? “Compare”? She is indeed truly a woman and truly a mother and, at this hour, she is truly experiencing the pains of childbirth. When her son was born she did not experience the anguish of giving birth in pain as other women do; it is now that she is suffering, that she is crucified, that she experiences sorrow like a woman in labor, because her hour has come ( Jn 16:21; cf.13:1; 17:1). (…) When this hour has passed, when the sword of sorrow has completely pierced her soul in labor (Lk 2:35), then no more shall she “remember the pain because a child has been born into the world” – the new man who renews the entire human race and reigns for ever over the whole world, truly born, beyond all suffering, immortal, the firstborn from the dead. If the Virgin has thus brought the salvation of us all into the world, in her son’s Passion, then she is indeed the mother of us all.

Roman Extraordinary (Tridentine) Daily Readings – rosary,team