Moreover, her Compassion was part of the Passion in the sense of having actually increased the Passion. With Judas, and Annas, and Caiaphas, with Pilate and Herod, with the Roman soldiers and the Jewish rabble, we must reckon Mary among those who wrung our Saviour's Heart with sorrow. Except the dereliction of His Father, we may well suppose that there was no pain in all His Passion equal to that which the vision of His Mother's broken heart supplied.

Thus Her Compassion was an integral part of His sufferings. Beautiful as it was, and exceedingly holy, a very worship in itself, and a very growth of heaven, to Him it was simple anguish. Intensely as He loved each soul of man, and therefore loved all souls collectively with an amount of burning desire which bewilders our conjectures, the single soul of His Mother was with Him an object of amazing love far beyond what He felt for all other creatures together. To see her, therefore, tempest-tossed on a dark ocean of unutterable woe, was, of itself, a fearful torture to Him; but that woe was caused by Himself; it was being poured out of His soul into hers each separate moment, at each separate shame, pain, outrage, and indignity. It was He who was stretching her on the rack, — He who was turning the instruments of her torture perpetually beyond the limits of human endurance, — He who was thickening the inconsolable darkness round about her.

It was He only who was doing all this. Without Him she would have had no dolors. It was her embrace of Him that was her agony. He was a fiery, sharp-edged cross to the heart He loved best of all. Then all the incalculable bitterness that He had poured out of Himself into her, He took back into Himself without taking it away from her. It re-entered His Sacred Heart as another separate Passion, another great creation of sorrow by itself, and overwhelmed Him with a very deluge of tempestuous grief. Thus her Compassion came out of the Passion, and went into it again, so that there was rather an identity between the two, than a union of them. Her Compassion was the Passion taking a particular form. Her words to St. Bridget express this: "The sorrow of Christ was my sorrow, because His Heart was my heart. For, as Adam and Eve sold the world for one apple, my Son and I redeemed the world with one heart." [Revelations, Book I, Chapter 35.]

Taken from book by Father Frederick William Faber “At the foot of the Cross”

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