Dr. Tom Williams

There's been for many centuries a devotion of special consolation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who knows a sorrow and an abandonment.

on Holy Saturday that the rest of humanity does not experience.

And the reason that Saturday has always been considered Mary's day, the day after her passion, in a way, was on Saturday and Christ's passion was on Friday.

That's why we celebrate the Immaculate Heart of Mary always on a Saturday, the day after we celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

It's her sharing in the passion.

but also in a particular way of having Jesus, her son, taken from her.

This day of mourning, this day of loss, when she experiences this desolation of soul because her beloved son, Jesus, has been taken from her.

She watched him suffer and die, and now he's laid in a tomb.

And so there is also that beautiful tradition of consolation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, particularly on that Saturday.

Well, that is, yeah, that is the unfortunate reality.

It's not a very cheery book.

It's meant to be an honest book.

It's meant to be a book that digs in.

And also, in a way, a hopeful book in the sense that Christians are always called to live by hope, and especially when things get darkest.

But the reality is that things are simply getting worse.

And they're getting worse in a particular way, in an accelerated way, in the post-Christian West.

And it's what I find most distressing.

There have always been active persecutions among nonbelievers, among other religions that find Christianity intolerable, among atheist communist regimes.

This is something that we know exists, and we're in a way prepared for that.

What we're less prepared for, I think, is our own society, which was founded on principles of religious liberty, founded on the worship of God.