Jesus inherited from His Mother His delicacy of heart. We publish a fragment of book "What Jesus owes to His Mother".

Every child receives from his mother his sensibility, his delicacy of heart, his emotional capacity. It was from the Blessed Virgin that Jesus inherited His faculty of compassion which was in evidence His whole life long. He, who, racked by hunger after forty days of fasting, refuses to work a miracle to obtain bread, cannot resist the pity which wells up in Himself at the sight of the crowd which follows Him like sheep without a shepherd, and He multiplies bread and fish to feed them; for, explain the evangelists, "He had pity on the multitude." When He enters the little village of Naim, He meets a widow whom He did not know; but it is a widow who has just lost her son, and it is her only son. The Lord, seeing her, is moved to the very depths, writes St. Luke. At the sight of such grief, He is overcome and cries: "O woman! Weep not!" He restores the dead man to life and "gives him to his mother" (Luke 7:13). In the same way, arriving at Bethany after the death of Lazarus, He sees Mary, Lazarus' sister, all in tears and broken with sorrow.

St. John, who accompanied Him, notes that "he groaned in anguish." We know that Jesus wept over his country's capital: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, (...) how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathers her young under her wings" (Matt. 23:37).

St. Mark, the observant, remarks that the breast of the Master heaved with compassion before the deaf-mute: Looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said to him, "Ephpheta," that is, "Be thou opened" (Mark 7:34).

It is precisely because the son of the Virgin Mary was so exquisitely sensitive that He felt all the trials He suffered far more acutely than we ever could. First of all, there was the constant anguish at the thought of the sufferings He was going to endure. He Himself, normally so reticent about His personal feelings, could not prevent Himself from opening His heart to the Twelve: "But I have a baptism to be baptized with and how distressed I am until it is accomplished" (Luke 12:50).

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