The image of the grieving Mother, who in her suffering had become sheer compassion and who holds the dead Christ in her lap has become especially dear to Christian piety. In the compassionate Mother, sufferers of all ages have found the purest reflection of divine compassion that is the only true consolation. For looked at in its deepest essence, all pain, all suffering is solitude, loss of love, the wrecked happiness of the rejected. Only the “com” the “with” can heal pain…
…In her, God’s maternal affliction is open to view. In her we can behold and touch it. She is the “compassio” of God, displayed in a human being who has let herself be drawn wholly into God’s mystery…
The “Pieta” completes the picture of the Cross because Mary is the accepted Cross, the Cross communicating itself in love, the cross that now allows us to experience in her compassion, the compassion of God. In this way, the Mother’s affliction is Easter affliction which already inaugurates the transformation of death into the redemptive being with of love…
