04/30/00

Divine Mercy Sunday: the canonization of
Sr. Faustina Kowalska

The Second Sunday of Easter has come to be called Divine Mercy Sunday by Catholics who believe that in 1937 Christ asked a Polish woman religious, Sr. Faustina Kowalska, to begin a novena on Good Friday and pray for God’s mercy for a different group of people each day until the Second Sunday of Easter. The groups to be prayed for include all sinners, priests and religious, the devout, unbelievers, those who have left the Church, little children, those who are themselves merciful, the souls detained in purgatory, those who are lukewarm in their love. The novena and its prayers for God’s mercy in our day have been growing in popularity in the last twenty years.

Sr. Faustina was born in 1905 and, after entering the convent at twenty, received a number of “messages” from the Lord throughout the 1930s. Her spiritual director instructed her to keep a diary, which became the basis for the devotion to the Divine Mercy after her death from tuberculosis in 1938. This Second Sunday of Easter, April 30, 2000, Sr. Faustina will be declared a Saint.

Why? First of all, because Helena Kowalska throughout her life grew in intimacy with the Lord. She achieved a high degree of sanctity which became better known through her diary after her death. Her devotion to Mary Immaculate and her love of the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist gave her strength in the midst of psychological and physical suffering. But, secondly, hers was a kind of intimacy which emphasized complete trust in God. This is not new, but its emphasis in the search for holiness can be read as a corrective to the trends of the time.

God often uses a particular person or event to draw out of the total patrimony of the faith a notion or practice which responds to the needs of a particular age. When, in 17th century France, Christ was being reduced to a divine judge separated from his people by theologians squabbling about grace, he appeared to St. Margaret Mary and showed her His human heart. When the world was about to be consumed by war and by ideologies of violence at the beginning of the 20th century, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared at Fatima to tell three Portuguese children to pray for peace.

God accompanies His people. He is not trapped in a book, even in the pages of Sacred Scripture, although Scripture remains the privileged written witness to God’s ways with His people. God is not confined to the age when Jesus walked among his disciples and taught, although the apostolic age remains normative for the essentials of the faith. But just as doctrinal teaching develops without betraying the faith that comes to us from the apostles, spirituality also grows in directions that respond both to the needs of people in different times and the providence of a God who anticipates our needs. Often the bearer of a message doesn’t understand it fully, because the message is for the next generation. God often chooses messengers who won’t put themselves into the message. He uses the poor to confound the rich, the ignorant to reproach the learned.

Our generation needs to trust. In his most recent encyclical on the dialogue between faith and reason, Pope John Paul II spoke of the skepticism which wounds the intellect in our day. Despite or even because of advances in many fields of knowledge, trust that the human intellect can attain truth about the nature of things is weak in our day. Moral and religious truth is reduced to personal opinion, because what constitutes intellectual evidence has been so narrowed as to destroy reason’s confidence in its ability to recognize truth.

In interpersonal and social matters as well, we labor from within a “hermeneutic of suspicion” which demands incontrovertible “proof” before anyone can be trusted. Betrayed too often, we turn our marvelous ability to be critical into a tool to destroy. Ironically, this tendency often leaves us insufficiently critical of attacks against others which depend for their force less on evidence than on a generalized attitude of suspicion. We become gullible, victims of our own cynicism, willing to believe anything about events or other persons as long as it’s bad. Each person stands alone against the world, with defenses high against intellectual deception and personal betrayal. The besetting sin of our age is self-righteousness, a self-righteousness often born of fear.
Mercy is love which is eager to forgive because it has learned to trust. Mercy is born of the confidence that, in the end, all will be well because God’s love is infinite. A merciful person is never self-righteous, because he or she has tasted the forgiveness of God and, humbled by His grace, is eager to forgive others in turn.

Self-righteousness in the Church takes different forms. Sometimes “law” is used as a club; sometimes “renewal” is used to impose an agenda. Both law and renewal are good and necessary for the Church’s life; but used by the self-righteous either can lead to division rather than unity, anger rather than mercy.

The devotion to Divine Mercy is a prayer for our time. Those interested in knowing more about St. Faustina Kowalska and what the Lord showed her in prayer can write to the Marians of the Immaculate Conception in Stockbridge, MA 01263. This Sunday, as we listen to the Risen Lord offer peace to his fearful disciples in the Gospel of the day, we hear this greeting in the context of God’s mercy because of the canonization of St. Faustina Kowalska. May her prayers give us strength to trust God and those He gives us to love.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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