Our Lady of Medjugorje, in private revelation given to Marija Pavlovic-Lunetti, on June 25, 2025:
“Dear children, also today I thank the Almighty that I am with you and that I can lead you towards the God of love and peace. The ideologies which destroy you and your spiritual life are transitory. I am calling you, little children: return to God, because with God you have a future and eternal life. Thank you for having responded to my call.”
“Dear children, be peacemakers. Satan is strong and wants war and restlessness, he wants hatred, so l call you to be my children, children of my heart.”
An excerpt from “Tears of God: Persevering in the Face of Great Sorrow or Catastrophe” by Father Benedict Groeschel:
We who believe in Divine Providence, in life after death, in salvation and resurrection; we, of all people, when faced with catastrophe, must go on with courage, faith, and hope. We must make things different. We must not remain fixed in the grief of the past, but move on to doing good and making things better in the future. The wound of sorrow will always be there. We don’t want it to go away. We want the wound to heal and scar. We can work while that scar exists.
A belief in the immortality of the human soul, of the survival of the person beyond death, is one of the most important expressions of human hope. As we draw this consideration of catastrophe and horror to an end, we must recognize that hope is given to us, especially by Christ in the New Testament. He inspires this hope by His words and His actions in relation to the dead, especially Lazarus, the widow’s son, and the little girl whom He called back from the dead.
The meaning of Christ is most powerfully proclaimed by His own Resurrection. “I know that my Redeemer lives.” These words from the book of Job (19:25) are extremely important to keep before your mind if you face catastrophe. Whether the catastrophe includes death or not, you must hold on firmly to the belief that after this earthly life, which brings sorrow to everyone, we shall be called into everlasting life where there is no mourning, no weeping, no crying anymore; because all of these things have passed away. We shall see a new heaven and a new earth and the wonderful visions given at the end of the Book of Revelation (chapters 21, 22) will be our actual fate, our destiny.
“Why does Mary have the title ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’ if she is in heaven?” (answered by Monsignor Charles Pope)
That Mary “stood” is significant and is attested by [Saint] John: “Standing by the Cross of Jesus were His mother and His mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala” (John 19:25).
Thus, while Mary’s sorrow is real, her posture of standing indicates that she is not crushed. She is not collapsed and inwardly focused on her own grief. Her standing indicates faith and is an act of support for her Son, Jesus. Thus, she models grief that is profound yet not utterly paralyzing or self-absorbing.
That Mary is currently joyful in heaven is certainly believed and celebrated. The title “Our Lady of Sorrows” points essentially to her historical sorrow.
However, Mary has surely, as seen through many apparitions, indicated a deep concern for our condition and spiritual welfare. There are even weeping statues that seem to convey this.
How her beatitude in heaven interacts with her concerns for us is mysterious. She is certainly not bereft of happiness, but her sorrow at the Cross is somehow manifest to us in apparitions as she beholds both our earthly sufferings and our waywardness.
From “Gaudium et Spes” by Saint Paul VI:
Only in freedom can man direct himself toward goodness. Our contemporaries make much of this freedom and pursue it eagerly; and rightly to be sure. Often however, they foster it perversely as a license for doing whatever pleases them, even if it is evil. For its part, authentic freedom is an exceptional sign of the divine image within man. For God has willed that man remain “under the control of his own decisions,” so that he can seek his Creator spontaneously, and come freely to utter and blissful perfection through loyalty to Him. Hence, man’s dignity demands that he act according to a knowing and free choice that is personally motivated and prompted from within, not under blind internal impulse nor by mere external pressure. Man achieves such dignity when, emancipating himself from all captivity to passion, he pursues his goal in a spontaneous choice of what is good, and procures for himself through effective and skillful action, apt helps to that end.
Since man’s freedom has been damaged by sin, only by the aid of God’s grace can he bring such a relationship with God into full flower. Before the judgment seat of God, each man must render an account of his own life, whether he has done good or evil.
It is in the face of death that the riddle a human existence grows most acute. Not only is man tormented by pain and by the advancing deterioration of his body, but even more so by a dread of perpetual extinction. He rightly follows the intuition of his heart when he abhors and repudiates the utter ruin and total disappearance of his own person. He rebels against death because he bears in himself an eternal seed which cannot be reduced to sheer matter. All the endeavors of technology, though useful in the extreme, cannot calm his anxiety; for prolongation of biological life is unable to satisfy that desire for higher life which is inescapably lodged in his breast.
Although the mystery of death utterly beggars the imagination, the Church has been taught by divine revelation and firmly teaches that man has been created by God for a blissful purpose beyond the reach of earthly misery. In addition, that bodily death from which man would have been immune had he not sinned will be vanquished, according to the Christian faith, when man who was ruined by his own doing is restored to wholeness by an almighty and merciful Savior.
For God has called man, and still calls him, so that with his entire being he might be joined to Him in an endless sharing of a divine life beyond all corruption. Christ won this victory when He rose to life, for by His death, He freed man from death. Hence, to every thoughtful man, a solidly established faith provides the answer to his anxiety about what the future holds for him. At the same time, faith gives him the power to be united in Christ with his loved ones who have already been snatched away by death; faith arouses the hope that they have found true life with God.
