13 December 2025

In the thirteenth station of the cross, Jesus is removed from the cross and placed in the arms of his mother, Mary. It is traditionally called the Pieta. It has its origins not in the Biblical witness but in the fourteenth century German Church. It is often depicted as a sculpture.

There is nothing to establish the truth of this in the Gospels. Mary is certainly a witness to the crucifixion and St. John famously reports that Jesus invited the beloved disciple to treat Mary as his mother and asks Mary to consider John as her son.

The Pieta is the fruit of a creative imagination. It is not difficult to see the pattern of the mother cradling her baby in her arms morph into the weeping mother holding her dead son in her arms with thorns in his brow, wounds in hands and side all bloodied and bruised. But who knows whether it was true or not?

In his novella, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013, Colm Toibin paints a very honest picture of Mary who will not be persuaded to say anything about Jesus which leads her into conjecture or creativity. She is nobody’s fool.

In the book, Toibin considers that Mary dreams that she cradled her deceased son in her arms but confesses that this did not happen in reality. ‘It will not be long before that dream, so close to me now and so real, will fill the air and will make its way backwards into time and thus become what happens ..’ she says.

What happened was her escape, random and uncertain which she has difficulty conjuring up. The creative imagination has distorted the historic witness. What has been lost - the powerful austerity of the crucifixion, the rejection of sentiment  and an attentive gaze  not on Mary but on  the man of sorrows!