Collection: Mary, Comfort of the Afflicted

ARTIST: Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS

ARTWORK NARRATIVE:

Mother Mary knows all about us. Just as she stepped in to comfort the afflicted hosts of the wedding at Cana, she steps in to assist us in even the smallest challenges. She is rightly called Comfort of the Afflicted; she rushes to our aid, intercedes for us, and consoles our weary hearts.

It is in Mary’s consolation that we find her guidance as well. She always points toward Christ, a compass for the lost and lonely. Her very existence serves to bring Christ to each of us, as through the Father gave us his only son.

We need only ask for her intercession.

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Mary is the "Consolatrix Afflictorum," the Consoler of the Afflicted

St. Paul says that his Lord comforted him in all his tribulations, that he also might be able to comfort them who are in distress, by the encouragement which he received from God. This is the secret of true consolation: those are able to comfort others who, in their own case, have been much tried, and have felt the need of consolation, and have received it. So of our Lord Himself it is said: "In that He Himself hath suffered and been tempted, He is able to succor those also that are tempted."

And this too is why the Blessed Virgin is the comforter of the afflicted. 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. And she especially can console us because she suffered more than mothers in general. Women, at least delicate women, are commonly shielded from rude experience of the highways of the world; but she, after our Lord's Ascension, was sent out into foreign lands almost as the Apostles were, a sheep among wolves. In spite of all St. John's care of her, which was as great as was St. Joseph's in her younger days, she, more than all the saints of God, was a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth, in proportion to her greater love of Him who had been on earth and had gone away. As, when our Lord was an Infant, she had to flee across the desert to the heathen Egypt, so, when He had ascended on high, she had to go on shipboard to the heathen Ephesus, where she lived and died.

O ye who are in the midst of rude neighbors or scoffing companions, or of wicked acquaintance, or of spiteful enemies, and are helpless, invoke the aid of Mary by the memory of her own sufferings among the heathen Greeks and the heathen Egyptians.
"Excerpts from "Meditations and Devotions"