The Kind Woman in Heaven
One cold December night, Bishop Jean Marie Latour spotted an elderly woman crouched in the doorway of his church. She was crying: for the first time in nineteen years, she had managed to escape her captors to visit the church, only to find it locked. The bishop opened the doors for her, and the two prayed together before the statue of Our Lady.
Never had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as on that pale December night. He was able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar to her who was without possessions; the tapers, the image of the Virgin, the figures of the saints, the Cross that took away indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ. Kneeling beside the much enduring bond-woman, he experienced those holy mysteries as he had done in his young manhood. He seemed able to feel all it meant to her to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones on earth. Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world’s hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman’s tenderness. Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer. Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in the Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could ever utterly cut himself off from; that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying soldier or the martyr on the rack. The beautiful concept of Mary pierced the priest’s heart like a sword.
— Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
The story may be fictional, but the message is true, and has been experienced by countless many. “The Blessed Virgin is the comforter of the afflicted,” writes Our Cardinal. “We all know how special a mother’s consolation is, and we are allowed to call Mary our Mother from the time that our Lord from the Cross established the relation of mother and son between her and St John.”
Even Christ benefitted from the his Mother’s consolation. As he hung on the cross, he knew that she was the one person who had no part in his being there. His Mother alone was in no way responsible through her own actions for his suffering, thanks to the extraordinary gift of God’s grace that she received from the very first moment of her existence. Mary’s Immaculate Conception enabled her to comfort her Son even in his agony, in a way that no other human being ever could. And she is for us still that “Kind Woman in Heaven”, a fountain of pity, and a consolation to all of us in this vale of tears.