In a series of revelations to St. Maria Faustina Kowalska in the 1930s, Our Lord called for a special feast day to be celebrated on the Sunday after Easter. Today, we know that feast as Divine Mercy Sunday, named by Pope St. John Paul II at the canonization of St. Faustina on April 30, 2000. Divine Mercy Sunday this year will be celebrated on April 11.
The Lord expressed his will with regard to this feast in his very first revelation to St. Faustina. The most comprehensive revelation can be found in her Diary entry 699: “My daughter, tell the whole world about my inconceivable mercy. I desire that the Feast of Mercy be a refuge and a shelter for all souls and especially for poor sinners. On that day the very depths of my tender mercy are open.”
All people poor or rich, respected or ignored have the right to plead with Jesus for anything. It is important to prepare yourself well for this day through confession, to receive Jesus into your heart in Holy Communion, and have an attitude of trust in God and mercy towards others.
At this particular time that we live in, a good God tells us that he loves us very much and wants to embrace us with his merciful love.
“Tell distressed humankind to come up and cling to My Heart, and I shall fill it with peace” (Diary, 1074) — these words directed Jesus to St. Faustina. Anxiety and fear have been penetrating our everyday life more and more recently. Epidemics, wars, persecution destroy our daily routine, but can they destroy our faith in God and His Mercy? After all, it is he who is our support and strength in times of difficulty.
During his pontificate, St. Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical entitled Dives in Misericordia. It is a beautiful reflection on God “who is rich in mercy” as Scripture says: “At no time… especially at a moment as critical as our own — can the Church forget the prayer that is a cry for the mercy of God… The Church has the right and the duty to appeal to the God of mercy ‘with loud cries’ ” (Rich in Mercy, 15). On June 7, 1997, St. John Paul II emphasized, “Those who sincerely say ‘Jesus, I trust in you’ will find comfort in all their anxieties and fears. There is nothing more man needs than Divine Mercy — that love which is benevolent, which is compassionate, which raises man above his weakness to the infinite heights to the holiness of God.”
In 2002, the Great Mercy Pope entrusted the whole world to Divine Mercy when he consecrated the International Shrine of The Divine Mercy in Lagiewniki, a suburb of Krakow in Poland. Just as Pope John Paul II entrusted the whole world to Divine Mercy in 2000, our Bishop Emeritus Arthur Serratelli entrusted the Diocese of Paterson to Divine Mercy on April 11, 2010.
The topic of God’s merciful love also plays an important role in the teaching of Pope Francis.
Pope Francis called, from Dec. 8, 2015– Nov. 20, 2016, an Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy to direct our attention and actions “on mercy so that we may become a more effective sign of the Father’s actions in our lives … a time when the witness of believers might grow stronger and more effective.”
In his book published as Pope: The Name of God Is Mercy, and in conjunction with the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, Pope Francis invited all humanity to an intimate and personal dialogue on the subject closest to his heart — mercy — which has long been the cornerstone of his faith and is now the central teaching of his papacy: “Mercy will always be greater than any sin, no one can put a limit on the love of the all-forgiving God. Just by looking at him, just raising our eyes from ourselves and our wounds, we leave an opening for the action of his grace. Jesus performs miracles with our sins, with what we are, with our nothingness, with our wretchedness.”
On Ash Wednesday, the Missionaries of Mercy were sent forth by Pope Francis during a celebration in St. Peter’s Basilica. In his Apostolic letter Misericordia et misera, Pope Francis extended the faculties of the specially appointed priests, known as Missionaries of Mercy, beyond the Jubilee Year of Mercy as “a concrete sign that the grace of the Jubilee remains alive and effective the world over” (MM 9).
Missionaries of Mercy have a three-fold mission of mercy that is their mandate: to preach about the Lord’s merciful love, to make that mercy as available as possible to as many as possible through the Sacrament of Confession, and to become more and more an icon of the Father’s merciful love and the Church’s maternal compassionate solicitude. Pope Francis has expressed his intention to gather the Missionaries of Mercy for a meeting every other year in Rome. The next meeting is going to be on April 23–25, 2022 in Rome.