Laetare Sunday commemorates the Church as Mother and Bride
We are not ready to enter Passiontide and Holy Week until we have passed through the Sundays of Lent beforehand.
We are not ready to enter Passiontide and Holy Week until we have passed through the Sundays of Lent beforehand.
The Sundays of Lent—Preparing for Passiontide
Over the four Sundays leading up to Passiontide, the Church presents Christ in a particular way: not yet as the suffering Victim, but as the divine Conqueror. These weeks are marked by strength, glory, and victory—preparing us to meet the mystery of the Cross with confidence.
These Sundays are not merely moral instruction or generic encouragement. They are a kind of spiritual scaffolding, designed to build in us a vivid image of Christ’s power, so that we may endure with him in Passiontide. As Pius XII teaches, the Passion is “the principal mystery of our redemption”—and we must be properly formed to approach it.1
Christ revealed in the Sundays of Lent
Throughout these weeks, Christ is presented as:
The Warrior resisting Satan in the desert
The transfigured Son on Mount Tabor
“The stronger man” driving out demons and defeating evil
and, on this fourth “Laetare Sunday,” as Lord over matter itself, multiplying bread in the wilderness.
Each of these images reveals not only Christ’s divinity, but also his trustworthiness. They teach the catechumens—and us—that this is no ordinary man who suffers on Good Friday. He is worthy of our love, our loyalty, and our self-denial.
This is especially relevant in light of the ancient catechumenate. In the early Church, baptism was not a cultural rite of passage, but a dangerous act of allegiance. It could cost one’s family, status, liberty—or life. The Lenten Sundays, then, offer not sentimentality, but strength. They are designed to inspire the love and reverence required for sacrifice.
But just as the Church devotes these Sundays to presenting Christ’s strength, she also chooses one Sunday—Laetare Sunday—to reveal something else: herself.
Laetare Sunday—The Church unveiled
On Laetare Sunday, the Church lifts the veil. She turns our gaze not only toward Christ, but toward herself. The liturgy invites us to see the Church as the destination of the baptised and the mother of the faithful. For the first time in Lent, she openly calls for our love.
The Introit announces this shift:
Introit: Rejoice, O Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all you that love her: rejoice for joy with her, all you that mourn for her. That you may suck, and be filled with the breasts of her consolations (Is. 66.10-1). V. I rejoiced at the things that were said to me: We shall go into the house of the Lord. (Ps. 121.1)
Here, the Church speaks not of the earthly Jerusalem, but of herself—the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city, the spouse of Christ and mother of the faithful.
Pinsk highlights a comment from St Ambrose on this passage:
“What are the breasts of the Church? Are they not the sacrament of baptism as often as it is administered?”2
He continues:
“How must such words have sounded in the ears of the catechumens! This, then was their destiny, their vocation!
“Were they uprooted from home and family? They would find a new heart and home through the Mother Church and among the people of God.
“Were they to be politically disenfranchised, ostracized? They rejoiced to know that they were on the way to the House of God, to that new city in which there would be peace and prosperity in security.
“And this overcame all those primordial fears that had been engendered by their decision to take their stand for Christ and the Church.
“Face to face with such a Church, mother of life and city of peace eternal, the catechumens confess in exultant joy, together with the whole Christian community, their ultimate assuagement, the slaking of all their fears and longings. […]
“Whatever the baptized Christian has renounced in his break with the world, he finds it again in the holy city of God, in the shelter and sanctuary of Mother Church.”3
The other propers for the day reinforce this same theme:
Gradual: I rejoiced at the things that were said to me: we shall go into the house of the Lord. V. Let peace be in thy strength: and abundance in thy towers.
Tract: They that trust in the Lord shall be as Mount Sion: he shall not be moved for ever that dwelleth in Jerusalem. V. Mountains are round about it: so the Lord is round about his people, from henceforth now and forever.
Communion: Jerusalem, which is built as a city, which is compact together: for thither did the tribes go up the tribes of the Lord, to praise thy name, O Lord.
These are not vague allegories. The Church is presenting herself. She is the secure city of God, the “pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). In her, the faithful find strength, identity, and eternal life—even if they must endure trial or persecution for Christ’s sake.
Jerusalem is our Mother
This theme of the Church as our mother continues in the Epistle, where St Paul compares Abraham’s sons: one born of the slave Agar, the other of the free woman Sarah. He writes:
“[T]hat Jerusalem which is above is free: which is our mother. For it is written: Rejoice, thou barren, that bearest not: […] for many are the children of the desolate, more than of her that hath a husband.”
Through baptism, the catechumens are not simply made Christians—they become children of the Church, the free woman, the heavenly Jerusalem. This is the reason for the joy of Laetare Sunday, which proclaims this maternal identity and dignity. The joy it calls for is the joy of discovering our true mother: the spouse of Christ, fruitful, free, and life-giving. As Pope Pius XII teaches:
“Christ our Lord wills the Church to live His own supernatural life, and by His divine power permeates His whole Body and nourishes and sustains each of the members according to the place which they occupy in the body, in the same way as the vine nourishes and makes fruitful the branches which are joined to it.”4
St Thomas Aquinas summarises this simply:
“The head and members are as one mystic person.”5
And St Augustine:
“[Christ] is the Head of the Church, and the Church is His Body, [and the] Whole Christ is both the Head and the Body.”6
This is why Fr Faber writes:
“[A] man’s love of the Church is the surest test of his love of God.”7
And Fr John Kearney gives the theological conclusion in brief:
“To love the Church is to love Christ.”8
Through the Church, Christ forms us, teaches us, feeds us, and guides us into his own life. Her doctrine, her laws, her tradition, her sacraments, and her liturgy are his work. As Pius XII writes:
“[T]he liturgical year, devotedly fostered and accompanied by the Church, is not a cold and lifeless representation of the events of the past, or a simple and bare record of a former age. It is rather Christ Himself who is ever living in His Church.”9
In all this, the Church is not just an organisation. She is the spouse of Christ and our mother. It is right that we love our mother.
Loving the Church during her passion
In light of this, the words of the Introit speak to us directly—not as individuals, but as sons of the Church:
Introit: Rejoice, O Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all you that love her: rejoice for joy with her, all you that mourn for her. That you may suck, and be filled with the breasts of her consolations: (Is. 66.10-1)
We are those who love her. We are also those who mourn for her. How could we not, as she exists in a kind of Babylonian Exile, as we discussed in relation to Septuagesima?
We have seen her mocked, wounded, and defaced over the past sixty years—betrayed not only by her enemies, but by those who claim to serve her. We mourn not because we doubt her divine origin, but because we see her maternal dignity profaned. And we suffer this exile not just in theory, but in our own parishes, families, and nations.
Many of her children have fallen into heresy, schism, or apostasy—men who once received her sacraments, learned her doctrine, tasted the good word of God, and were “made partakers of the Holy Ghost” (Heb. 6:4). Even among those who remain externally in her fold, brother has turned against brother in misguided defence of the very men who seek to deform her.
As we sing with her, at Tenebrae in Holy Week:
“O all ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow.”
You’ve seen the sorrow. The Church betrayed, wounded, and in exile—yet this is not the end of the story.
The WM+ article goes further, showing how the Church’s own liturgy reveals her future vindication.
Read on as we explore the promise of restoration—and what it means for those who remain faithful today.