Most people know that St. Patrick is the patron of Ireland, St. George of England and St. Joan of Arc for France. The Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., reminds Catholics that Mary, under the title of the Immaculate Conception, is the patron of the United States. And those who have followed historical developments and cultural trends understand why Our Lady of Guadalupe is the patron saint of the Americas — North, Central and South.

Feb. 14 is the actual feast day of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, and Sept. 11 is our founder’s day. Sept. 15, however, is lesser known. On that day, we observe the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. She is and has long been the motherly patron of Slovakia. My community was founded by a priest of the Diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Father Matthew Jankola.

Father Jankola was an immigrant from Slovakia at the time when many Central and Eastern Europeans were pouring into the U.S. and taking up coal mining, steelworking and farming. They formed parishes where priests could offer religious instruction, hear confessions and preach in their language. They founded schools where bilingual sisters could educate immigrant children and communicate with their parents. Not surprisingly, our first sisters — and several generations after them — came from Slovak Catholic parishes in New England, the mid-Atlantic and the Midwest. While the people they served were fluent in English by the second generation, the sisters continued to observe feasts, hymns and familiar devotions of the mother country.

To this day, Our Lady of Sorrows gets special prayers among our sisters in the morning and evening on Sept. 15. We should note, though, that there is more to the custom than nostalgia.

The memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows harkens back to the prophecy offered by Simeon when the infant Jesus was presented in the temple, “and you yourself a sword will pierce” (Lk 2:35).

The identification of particular sorrows of Mary has crossed cultures for centuries. One can find Catholic parishes and shrines named Seven Dolors or Seven Sorrows. 

There is a Seven Sorrows rosary, with seven beads for each sorrow, that recounts her pain at Simeon’s prophecy, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the young Jesus in the Temple, meeting Jesus on the way to Calvary, being present at the foot of the cross, the removal of Jesus’ body from the cross and his burial. Michaelangelo’s Pièta is the most famous artistic representation of the Sorrowful Mother and the Stabat Mater (“At the Cross Her Station Keeping”) the most familiar hymn. All remind us that Mary, full of grace, grieved.

We are fond of gentle Madonnas holding baby Jesus and are attracted to the bountiful, open-armed figure of Our Lady of Grace. But there is something both poignant and powerful about the Sorrowful Mother.

A few years ago, I came across a study that compared and contrasted the religious life of Costa Rican Catholic and Finnish Orthodox women. While the forms and expressions of faith varied, a major commonality among them was the persistence of strong devotion to Mary. The women testified to their sense that, amid poverty, difficult pregnancies, marital problems, illnesses and deaths of children, civic turmoil, instances of persecution and injustice, they always knew they could turn to the Blessed Mother. The reason they gave can be summed up with the comment a number of them made: “She gets us.” They had the sense that Mary was no stranger to the insecurities of daily living, anxiety, heartbreak. She had seen her son tortured and put to death.

This same sense prevailed among the Slovak people. They endured centuries of domination and occupation by wealthier and more heavily armed cultures. They were persecuted for speaking their own language, and the practice of religion was suppressed. In the 20th century, they endured Nazi and then Communist repression. My community learned that after the collapse of Soviet Communism, there was another group of Sisters of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, a Czech and Slovak group, who had survived underground when their convents were seized and their ministries disbanded after World War II. The holy brothers, the evangelists Cyril and Methodius, and the Sorrowful Mother had protected them.

Our Lady of Sorrows speaks to the hearts of the distressed and grieving. She knew, in her earthly life, what it was to flee for the lives of herself and her family and, meanwhile, to raise a puzzling son and be torn by her inability to protect him. We often clothe her in elegant robes, but in real life she wore homespun. She could not set a sumptuous table. The Mother of God held lasting joy in her heart, yes — but life was tough, and she shed tears.

So, we sisters continue our devotion to her, holding before her our losses and our sadness over the evils and violence that persist in our world. We lament the erosion of faith in many quarters. At Mass on Sept. 15, we join in the Collect that says: “O God, who willed that, when your Son was lifted high on the cross, his mother should stand close by and share his suffering, grant that your Church, participating with the Virgin Mary in the passion of Christ, may merit a share in his resurrection.”

It is no coincidence that we remember Our Lady of Sorrows the day after the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Sept. 14). We know that our religious community, the universal Church, the people of Slovakia, our country and all nations can turn to one who, in the mysteries of divine providence and divine grace, “gets us.”