St. Robert Bellarmine: The Seven Words on the Cross

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CHAPTER XI: The third fruit to be drawn from the consideration of the third Word spoken by Christ upon the Cross.

We learn in the third place from the words which Christ addressed to His Mother and to His disciple from the pulpit of the Cross, what are the relative duties of parents towards their children, and of children towards their parents We will treat in the first place of the duties which parents owe their children. Christian parents should love their children, but in such a manner that the love of their children should not interfere with their love of God. This is the doctrine that our Lord lays down in the Gospel “He that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.”[1] It was in obedience to this law that our Lady stood near the Cross to her intense agony, yet with great constancy of soul. Her grief was a proof of the great love she bore her Son, Who was dying on the Cross beside her, and her constancy was a proof of her subservience to the God Who was reigning in heaven. The sight of her innocent Son, Whom she passionately loved, dying in the midst of such torments, was enough to break her heart; but even had she been able, she would not have hindered the crucifixion, since she knew that all these sufferings were being inflicted on her Son according to “the determinate council and fore-knowledge of God.”[2] Love is the measure of grief, and because this Virgin Mother loved much, therefore was she afflicted beyond measure at beholding her Son so cruelly tortured And how could this Virgin Mother help loving her Son, when she knew that He excelled the rest of mankind in every kind of excellence, and when He was related to her by a closer tie than other children are related to their parents? There is a twofold reason why parents love their offspring; one, because they have begotten them, and the other, because the good qualities of their children redound on themselves There are some parents, however, who feel but a slight attachment to their children, and others who positively hate them if they are deformed or wicked, or have the misfortune of being illegitimate Now for the aforesaid twofold reason, the Virgin Mother of God loved her Son more than any other mother could love her child In the first place, no woman has ever given birth to a child without the cooperation of her husband, but the Blessed Virgin brought forth her Son without any contact with man; as a Virgin she conceived Him, and as a Virgin she brought Him forth, and as Christ our Lord in the Divine generation has a Father without a Mother, so in the human generation He has a Mother without a Father. When we say that Christ our Lord was conceived of the Holy Ghost, we do not mean that the Holy Spirit is the Father of Christ, but that He formed and moulded the Body of Christ, not out of His own substance, but from the pure flesh of the Virgin. Truly then has the Virgin alone begotten Him, she alone can claim Him as her own Son, and therefore has she loved Him with more than a mother’s love In the second place, the Son of the Virgin not only was and is beautiful beyond the children of men but surpasses in every way all angels also, and as a natural consequence of her great love, the Blessed Virgin mourned over the Passion and Death of her Son more than others, and St. Bernard does not hesitate to affirm in one of his sermons, that the sorrow our Lady felt at the crucifixion was a martyrdom of the heart, according to the prophecy of Simeon “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul.”[3] And since the martyrdom of the heart is more bitter than the martyrdom of the body, St. Anselm in his work on the “Excellence of the Virgin,” says that the grief of the Virgin was more bitter than any bodily suffering Our Lord, in His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemani, suffered a martyrdom of the heart by passing in review all the sufferings and torments He was to endure on the morrow, and by opening on to His soul the floodgates of grief and fear He began to be so afflicted, that a Sweat of Blood diffused from His Body, an occurrence which we are not informed ever resulted from his corporal sufferings Therefore, beyond a doubt, our Blessed Lady carried a most heavy cross, and endured most poignant grief, from the sword of sorrow which pierced her soul, but she stood near the Cross the very model of patience, and beheld all His sufferings without manifesting a sign of impatience, because she sought the honour and glory of God rather than the gratification of her maternal love She did not fall to the ground half dead with sorrow, as some imagine; nor did she tear her hair, nor sob and cry aloud, but she bravely bore the affliction which it was the will of God she should bear She loved her Son vehemently, but she loved the honour of God the Father and the salvation of mankind more, just as her Divine Son preferred these two objects to the preservation of His life Moreover, her unwavering faith in the resurrection of her Son increased her confidence of soul to such an extent that she stood in no need of consolation from any man She was aware that the Death of her Son would be like a short sleep, according to what the Royal Psalmist said “I have slept and have taken my rest, and I have risen up, because the Lord hath protected me.”[4]

All the faithful should imitate this example of Christ by deferring the love of their children to the love of God, Who is the Father of all, and loves all with a greater and more beneficial love than we can bear ourselves. In the first place, Christian parents should love their children with a manly and prudent love, not encouraging them if they do wrong, but educating them in the fear of God, and correcting them, even chastising and punishing them if they either offend God or neglect their studies For this is the will of God, as it is revealed to us in Holy Writ, in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, “Hast thou children? instruct them, and bow down their neck from their childhood.”[5] And we read of Tobias that “from his infancy he taught his son to fear God and to abstain from all sin.”[6] The Apostle warns parents not to provoke their children to anger, lest they be discouraged, but to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, that is, to treat them not as slaves, but as children.[7] Parents who are too severe with their children, and who rebuke and punish them even for a small fault, treat them as slaves, and such treatment will discourage them and make them hate the paternal roof; and on the contrary, those parents who are too indulgent will rear up immoral children, who will become victims of hell- fire instead of possessing an immortal crown in heaven.

The right method for parents to adopt in the education of their children is to teach them to obey their superiors, and when they are disobedient to correct them, but in such a manner as to make it evident that the correction proceeds from a spirit of love and not of hatred. Moreover, if God calls a child to the priesthood or to the religious life, no impediment should be offered to his vocation, for parents should not oppose the will of God, but should say with holy Job “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord.”[8] Lastly, if parents lose their children by an untimely death, as our Blessed Lady lost her Divine Son, they should trust in the good judgment of God, Who sometimes takes a soul to Himself if He perceives that it may lose its innocence and so perish forever Truly if parents could penetrate into the designs of God in the death of a child, they would rejoice rather than weep: and if we had a lively faith in the Resurrection, as our Lady had, we should no more repine because a person dies in his youth, than we should weep because a person goes to sleep before night-time, since the death of the faithful is a kind of sleep, as the Apostle tells us in his Epistle to the Thessalonians: “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them who are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others who have no hope”.[9] The Apostle speaks rather of hope than of faith, because he does not refer to an uncertain resurrection, but to a happy and glorious resurrection, similar to that of Christ, which was a waking up to true life. For the man who has a firm faith in the resurrection of the body, and trusts that his dead child will rise again to glory, has no cause for sorrow, but great reason for rejoicing, because his child’s salvation is secured.

Our next point is to treat of the duty which children owe their parents Our Lord in His Death gave us a most perfect example of filial respect. Now, according to the words of the Apostle, the duty of children is “to requite their parents.”[10] Children requite their parents when they provide all necessary conveniences for them in their old age, just as their parents procured food and raiment for them in their infancy. When Christ was at the point of death He entrusted His aged Mother, who had no one to care for her, to the protection of St. John, and told her to look upon him in future as her son, and commanded St. John to reverence her as his mother And thus our Lord perfectly fulfilled the obligations which a son owes his mother. In the first place, in the person of St. John He gave His Virgin Mother a son who was of the same age as Himself, or perhaps a year younger, and therefore was in every way capable to provide for the comfort of the Mother of our Lord. Secondly, He gave her for a son the disciple whom He loved more than the rest, and who ardently returned Him love for love, and consequently our Lord had the greatest confidence in the diligence with which His disciple would support His Mother. Moreover He chose the disciple whom He knew would outlive the other apostles, and would consequently survive His parent Lastly, our Lord was mindful of His Mother at the most calamitous moment of His life, when His whole Body was the prey of sufferings, when His whole Soul was racked by the insolent taunts of His enemies, and He had to drink the bitter chalice of approaching death, so that it would seem He could think of nothing but His own sorrows Nevertheless, His love for His Mother triumphed over all, and forgetting Himself, His only thought was how to comfort and help her, nor was His hope in the promptitude and fidelity of His disciple deceived, for “from that hour he took her unto his own.”[11]

Every child has a greater obligation than our Lord had to provide for the temporal wants of his parents, since every man owes more to his parents than Christ owed to His Mother. Each infant receives a greater favour from his parents than he can ever hope to repay, for he has received from their hands what it is impossible for him to bestow on them, namely, a being “Remember,” says Ecclesiasticus, “that thou hadst not been born but through them.”[12] Christ alone is an exception to this rule He indeed received from His Mother His life as a man, but He bestowed on her three lives; her human life, when with the cooperation of the Father and the Holy Ghost He created her; her life of grace, when He forestalled her in the sweetness of His blessings by creating her Immaculate, and her life of glory when she was assumed into the kingdom of glory, and exalted above all the choirs of angels. Wherefore if Christ, Who gave His Blessed Mother more than He had received from her in His birth, wished to requite her, certainly the rest of mankind are still more obliged to requite their parents Moreover, we only do our duty in honouring our parents, and yet the goodness of God is such as to reward us for this In the Ten Commandments the law is laid down- -“Honour thy father and thy mother, that thou mayst be long-lived upon the land.”[13] And the Holy Ghost says: “He that honoureth his father shall have joy in his own children, and in the day of his prayer he shall be heard.”[14] And God does not only reward those who reverence their parents, but punishes those who are disrespectful to them, for these are the words of Christ: “God hath said He that curseth father or mother let him die the death.”[15] “And he is cursed of God that angereth his mother.[16] Hence we may conclude that a parent’s curse will bring ruin in its train, for God Himself will ratify it. This is proved by many examples; and one which St. Augustine relates in his City of God we will briefly narrate. In Caesarea, a town of Cappadocia, there were ten children, namely seven boys and three girls, who were cursed by their mother, and were immediately struck by heaven with such an infliction that all their limbs shook, and, in this pitiable plight, wheresoever any of them went, they were unable to bear the gaze of their fellow-citizens, and thus they wandered throughout the whole Roman world. At last two of them were cured by the relics of St. Stephen the Proto-martyr, in the presence of St. Augustine.


ENDNOTES

1. St. Matt. x. 37.
2. Acts. ii. 23.
3. St. Luke ii. 35.
4. Psalm iii. 6.
5. Ecclus. vii. 24.
6. Tobias i. 10.
7. Coloss. iii. 21; Ephes. vi. 4.
8. Job i. 21.
9. 1 Thess. iv. 12.
10. 1 Tim. v. 4.
11. St. John xix. 27.
12. Ecclus. vii. 30.
13. Exodus xx. 12.
14. Ecclus. iii. 6.
15. St. Matt. xv. 4.
16. Ecclus. iii. 18.