From the Desk of Deacon Dave, O.F.S.

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
May the Lord give you His peace!

A Divine Mercy Primer
Divine Mercy Sunday celebrates the merciful love of God shining through the Easter Triduum and the whole Easter mystery. The feast recovers an ancient liturgical tradition, reflected in a teaching attributed to St. Augustine about the Easter Octave, which he called “the days of mercy and pardon,” and the Octave Day itself “the compendium of the days of mercy.”
 
Pope St. John Paul II's interest in Divine Mercy goes back to the days of his youth in Krakow when Karol Wojtyla was an eyewitness to so much evil and suffering during World War II in occupied Poland. He witnessed the round ups of many people who were sent to concentration camps and slave labor. In his hometown of Wadowice, he had many Jewish friends who would later die in the Holocaust. During that time of terror and fear, Karol Wojtyla decided to enter Cardinal Sapieha's clandestine seminary in Krakow. He experienced the need for God's mercy and humanity’s need to be merciful to one another.

While in the seminary, he met another seminarian, Andrew Deskur (who would later become cardinal), who introduced Karol to the message of the Divine Mercy, as revealed to the Polish mystic nun, Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, who died at the age of 33 in 1938.

Early in his pontificate, in 1981, Pope John Paul II wrote an entire encyclical dedicated to Divine Mercy – Dives in Misericordia (“Rich in Mercy”) – illustrating that the heart of the mission of Jesus Christ was to reveal the merciful love of the Father. In 1993, when Pope John Paul II beatified Sister Faustina, he stated in the homily for her Beatification Mass: “Her mission continues and is yielding astonishing fruit. It is truly marvelous how her devotion to the merciful Jesus is spreading in our contemporary world and gaining so many human hearts!” 

Four years later in 1997, the Holy Father visited Blessed Faustina’s tomb in Lagiewniki, Poland, and preached powerful words: “There is nothing that man needs more than Divine Mercy. ... From here went out the message of mercy that Christ Himself chose to pass on to our generation through Blessed Faustina.”
 
In the Jubilee year 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized Sister Faustina – making her the first canonized saint of the new millennium – and established “Divine Mercy Sunday” as a special title for the Second Sunday of Easter for the Universal Church. Pope John Paul II spoke these words in the homily: “Jesus shows His hands and His side [to the Apostles]. He points, that is, to the wounds of the Passion, especially the wound in His Heart, the source from which flows the great wave of mercy poured out on humanity.”

One year later, in his homily for Divine Mercy Sunday 2001, the Pope called the message of mercy entrusted to St. Faustina: “The appropriate and incisive answer that God wanted to offer to the questions and expectations of human beings in our time, marked by terrible tragedies ... Divine Mercy! This is the Easter gift that the Church receives from the risen Christ and offers to humanity at the dawn of the third millennium.”
 
Again in Lagiewniki, Poland, at the dedication of the new Shrine of Divine Mercy in 2002, the Holy Father consecrated the whole world to Divine Mercy, saying: “I do so with the burning desire that the message of God’s merciful love, proclaimed here through St. Faustina, may be made known to all the peoples of the earth, and fill their hearts with hope.”
 
And of course we remember that God called this great Apostle of Divine Mercy home to Himself on April 2, 2005, the eve of the Feast of Divine Mercy that year. In his Regina Caeli address of April 23, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said: “The mystery of God’s merciful love was at the center of the pontificate of my venerated predecessor.” That same Providence desired that in 2010, on Divine Mercy Sunday, Benedict XVI would proclaim Blessed his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, the great apostle and ambassador of Divine Mercy [who was subsequently canonized a Saint by Pope Francis in 2014].

The message of mercy is that God loves us – all of us – no matter how great our sins. God’s mercy is greater than our sins, so that we will call upon Him with trust, receive His mercy, and let it flow through us to others. Essentially, mercy means the understanding of weakness, the capacity to forgive.

Throughout his priestly and episcopal ministry, and especially during his entire pontificate, Pope St. John Paul II preached God's mercy, wrote about it, and most of all lived it. He offered forgiveness to the man who attempted to assassinate him in St. Peter’s Square. The Pope who witnessed the scandal of divisions among Christians, and the atrocities against the Jewish people, did everything in his power to heal the wounds caused by the historic conflicts between Catholics and other Christian churches, and especially with the Jewish people.

We have so much for which to be grateful to God this Easter, and especially today, on this Divine Mercy Sunday 2024, for the gift of His infinite love and mercy poured out so generously upon us through the death and resurrection of His Son Jesus and the Church which He established as the sacrament of mercy for all time.

With a brother’s love in the Lord and Mary Immaculate,

Deacon Dave, O.F.S.
T    In Persona Christi Servi