On September 10, 2025, conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while addressing a crowd at an event at Utah Valley University. A cofounder of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that advocates for conservative policies in educational institutions, Kirk was known for his provocative discourse.
On an October 12, 2022 episode of his podcast, he stated his dislike for the concept of empathy. “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that—it does a lot of damage.”
Immediately after the shooting, people on social media began circulating some of Kirk’s more incendiary comments, including his dismissal of gun violence and his criticism of empathy. The most extreme posts suggested that his death was to be celebrated or somehow coming to him because of his political views.
What happened to Charlie Kirk was a tragedy. But the popularity of his ideas, as well as the online posts after his death, point to a very real problem in U.S. society: We have an empathy problem.
As our public discourse becomes increasingly cruel and the bonds that connect human beings in civil society fray and tatter, we need empathy more than ever. And perhaps a renewed devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows can help American Catholics counteract these arguments—and protect their own hearts from being hardened.
She is beautiful—especially beautiful for a woman with a sword through her heart. Tears roll down her smooth face, hidden in the folds of a dark mantle. The golden crown and halo above her head glint darkly, providing no light in this somber moment. Her heart, also gold, floats outside of her body, pierced through by at least one, if not seven, swords.
Such is the iconography of Our Lady of Sorrows. Arresting, agonizing, even gruesome—an image of human woundedness so universal, like the wailing mother in Picasso’s Guernica, that it touches even the most secular. No wonder that in the Orthodox Christian world this depiction of Mary is called “Softener of Evil Hearts.”
Mother to all of us, whatever our ethnicity or creed, Mary grieves with all who suffer. Thus, Our Lady of Sorrows reminds us of the power of empathy, and opens our hearts to compassion for the sorrows of others, even—and even especially—those whom we dislike or with whom we disagree. Her beauty amidst the disfigurement of pain is a testimony to the innate dignity of all God’s creatures.
This empathy to which Our Lady of Sorrows invites us is a component of genuine Christian charity. When we love as God loves, we step outside the finitude of our experience and see the essential value and dignity of the other, no matter how strange or foreign their experiences may be to us.
In the gospels, Jesus frequently models empathy, as when he looks on the crowds and has compassion for them, in Matthew 9:36. In John 11:35, at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesus weeps with those who mourn, even knowing he will summon Lazarus to return to life. Romans 12:15 instructs us to practice empathy: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.”
Scripture also provides the basis for devotion to Mary’s sorrows. In Luke’s account of the Presentation, the holy man Simeon recognizes the child Jesus as the Messiah and warns Mary she too will suffer: “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”
In depictions of the Immaculate Heart, often called the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, a sword literally pierces Mary’s heart. Since seven is the Biblical number of fullness and completion, some representations show her heart pierced with not just one but seven swords, representing the totality of her sorrow at the suffering of her son.
By the time of the Middle Ages, the devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows, spread especially by the Servite Order, identified each sword with a specific event:
- The Prophecy of Simeon
- The Flight into Egypt
- Losing the Child Jesus in Jerusalem
- Meeting Jesus on the Way of the Cross
- The Crucifixion
- The Descent of Christ’s Body from the Cross
- The Burial of Jesus
Empathy may ask us to grieve with those who grieve, rather than staying within our own sphere of indifference. Many of us won’t do this perfectly, true—but outright rejection of empathy is incompatible with the Christian understanding of each human being’s worth and dignity.
Ultimately, to reject empathy is to misunderstand Christ, Emmanuel, God-With-Us, who in one person unites two natures: the divine nature of God who is love and the human nature made in that loving God’s image. Though Jesus is divine, nonetheless, he was willing to take all human suffering with him to the cross and transmute it into the glory of salvation.
Many saints have recommended meditation on the passion, as a way to grow in holiness. And Mary, always eager to direct us to her son, is the model and teacher of this contemplation. When we turn to Our Lady of Sorrows, she points us to Christ’s passion, in which we contemplate the fullness of God’s compassion for humanity. And she invites us to imitate this compassion—yes, even for those who reject it.
One way we can practice devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows is by praying the Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows. In the 1980s, in an apparition the church later approved, Mary appeared in Kibeho, Rwanda, asking that the chaplet be prayed, and seemingly prophesying the genocide that would break out in 1994. This chaplet, also called the Servite rosary to distinguish it from the more common five-decade Dominican rosary, is seven sets of seven beads intended to guide meditation on these events.
If the full Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows seems intimidating, however, a good place to start in this devotion are the series of prayers penned by Pope Pius VII, each beginning “I grieve for you, O Mary most sorrowful.”
Simpler still, and easy to repeat throughout the day, is the penetrating prayer that ends each decade of the chaplet:
“Holy Mother, hear my prayers, and renew in my heart each wound of Jesus my Savior.”
Devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows can be an antidote to and public declaration against the spirits of hatred and indifference. Through the prayers of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, may our hearts be made more like hers.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Our Lady of Sorrows
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