Genuine acceptance of the Mercy of God is reflected in serenity
and joy.
Now if we are children,
then we are heirs—heirs of God
and co-heirs with Christ,
if indeed we share in his sufferings
in order that we may also share in his glory. (Rom 8:17)
In this Year of Mercy it is helpful to take note that since
the early decades of the 20th Century the Holy Spirit has been
announcing something essential for us, something new and yet as old as Christianity
itself.
As far back as the 17th
Century, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque received revelations of the Sacred Heart
and Jesus’ desire to make his love for all men and women known to the whole
world but shortly after her death her writings and message were embargoed. It
was not until the very end of the 19th Century that they became
available to the faithful which soon resulted in the canonization of St.
Margaret Mary in 1920. Five years later the immensely popular St. Thérèse of
Lisieux was canonized. She also had a great devotion to the Sacred Heart and
God’s merciful love. These two have played a large role in propagating the
message of God’s mercy but the Holy Spirit called on two other instruments to
further the message.
The French Connection
Maria Teresa
Desandais was a 26-year-old nun in the monastery of the Visitation of Dreux in
France when she began receiving revelations about the Merciful Love in 1902.
Regarding these revelations she wrote, “Love is not Loved because it is not
known. Before this situation, Merciful Love wants to reveal itself to this
world. To know God is also to know Merciful Love. Merciful Love is not a new
thing; the Church has taught it from the beginning. It is the love of the
Savior, his manifestation of the new Law. I do not want you to embrace this
devotion hoping to find in it some new form of spirituality.”
One of these revelations was the Offering to the Merciful
Love:
Holy Father, through the Immaculate
Heart of Mary, I offer to you Jesus, your beloved Son, and I offer myself in Him and through Him, and with Him for all your intentions, and on behalf of all
creatures.
Two years later, Jesus made her know that He wanted her to
paint Him on the cross just as He appeared to her. This was an image of Jesus
on the cross while still alive with a serene countenance with a consecrated
host behind. From the Sacred Heart on His chest rays shine down on the new
commandment “Love one another as I have loved you” at the foot of the cross where
there also lies a royal crown indicating the stripping of Jesus of his divine
glory to take on our mortal nature and suffer dishonor and humiliation.
Sr. Maria Teresa drew the image for the first time in 1912
and painted it in oil the following year. Jesus continued guiding her and made
it clear He wanted the devotion to the Merciful Love to expand beyond the walls
of her cloister to the whole world. From 1919 to her death in 1944, Sr. Maria
Teresa painted the image of the Merciful Love repeatedly and the devotion
spread through France and into Italy and parts of Spain.
From France to Spain
A few years after Sr. Maria Teresa expanded the devotion to
the Merciful Love beyond her convent her writings were discovered by a highly
respected Spanish theologian, the Dominican, Fr. Juan González Arintero who
immediately recognized that Sr. Maria Teresa’ writings expressed profound spiritual
truths in a simple form and in 1922 began translating them to Spanish and
including them in his journal, The
Spiritual Life. Soon, Arintero’s contagious enthusiasm was caught by a Jesuit,
St José María Rubio, who had his own channels to distribute the writings of Sr.
Maria Teresa.
To bolster the devotion to the Merciful Love on the Iberian
Peninsula, Sr. Maria Teresa sent two of her painting to Spain. First, to Juana
Lacasa, a married woman whose home had become, in effect, the central office
for the promulgation of the devotion in Spain. With the installation of the
painting in her home it quickly became a place of pilgrimage. So many people
sought to see the painting and listen to Lacasa explain the devotion that she
soon wrote to Arintero:
The house is invaded by people. I’m
exhausted with all the requests for prayer cards, simply exhausted. What a
marvelous triumph!
The other image was installed the next year at the Basilica
of Our Lady of Atocha which was attached to a convent of Sr. Maria Teresa’
religious order.
An Image from Poland
 |
Original Divine Mercy
painting by
Eugene Kazimierowski
(1934) in Vilnius
|
The year that Jesus instructed Sr. Maria Teresa to paint the
image of the Merciful Love also marked the birth of Faustina Kowalska in a
remote Polish village. In 1931, while a postulant in the Congregation of the
Mother of God of Mercy, she had a vision in which Jesus made it clear that He
was asking for the message of Divine Mercy to be propagated to the whole world because
men and women do not really know God’s mercy and from this comes all the evils
of the present age.
Our Lord also asked her to paint an image of Himself as He
appeared to her then:
My gaze from this image is like My gaze
from the cross.
Diary,
#326
He further expressed His desire for a new feast in the
Church, the feast of Mercy. In her diary entry of May 11, 1934, St. Faustina
writes that she told Jesus that she was surprised that He was asking for a new
feast day since she had been told that a feast already existed to celebrate His
Mercy.
Jesus answered me: “Who knows about it?
No one. And often even those entrusted to proclaim and teach this mercy to the
people do not know it. Therefore, I want the image solemnly blessed on the
first Sunday after Easter and venerated publicly so that every soul may know
about it.”
Diary,
#341
One Devotee Among
Many
Priests from every corner of Spain travelled to Madrid for
various reasons and it was not uncommon that they would lodge at residences
designed to house itinerant clergy. So when a newly-ordained priest from Zaragoza
came to study at the University of Madrid, he took a room in La Casa Sacerdotal
founded the year before by Luz Rodriguez-Casanova who soon recruited the
zealous young priest to work as chaplain at another of her apostolic
initiatives, the Patronato de Enfermos (Foundation for the Sick). There he met
Fr. Norberto Rodriguez, a holy priest 20 years his senior who was an avid
practitioner and promoter of the devotion to the Merciful Love of Sr. Maria
Teresa and the way of spiritual childhood of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. It was
surely Fr. Norberto who introduced the new resident, St. Josemará Escriva, to
these devotions and brought him to the Basilica of Atocha and the home of Juana
Lacasa.
After October 2, 1928 when God showed him his pastoral
mission of promoting the universal call to holiness, particularly to people
living in the middle of the world, he deepened in his devotion to the Merciful
Love convinced that only through reparation for sin would Opus Dei take root
and grow. At each Mass he said, he began to recite the Offering to the Merciful
Love at the moment of the elevation of Jesus in the sacred host.
The image filled St. Josemaría with a true contrition and
the desire to make reparation for sin. These were years of intense stress for
St. Josemaría and he was particularly impressed by the serenity of Jesus on the
cross portrayed in the painting. Serenity, cheerfulness, became the bedrock of
his interior life.
Don't bear your Cross with resignation:
resignation is not a generous word. Love the Cross. When you really love it,
your Cross will be... a Cross, without a Cross.
Holy Rosary,
Fourth Sorrowful Mystery
The first members of Opus Dei would occasionally accompany
him to pray before the painting in the Basilica of Atocha or the home of
Lacasa. Although St. Josemaria continued
his devotion to the Merciful Love, around 1935 he spoke less openly about it so
the members of Opus Dei would see this was not a collective devotion of the
Work and so they would feel free to live, or not to live, this private devotion.
A Feast and a Cross
Jesus told the French and Polish nuns that the message He
was giving them was universal: for the whole world and for all time. He took
further steps to assure its universality.
Sister Faustina’s writings and the painting were received
with suspicion when initially presented to the church authorities outside of
Poland. Fortunately, her process of canonization was taking place in the
Diocese of Cracow where Karol Wojtyla was bishop from 1958 and became her
champion. St. John Paul II fulfilled Jesus’ request to Sister Faustina,
establishing Divine Mercy Sunday in the year 2000.
As the Apostles once did, today too
humanity must welcome into the upper room of history the risen Christ, who
shows the wounds of his Crucifixion and repeats: “Peace be with you!” Humanity
must let itself be touched and pervaded by the Spirit given to it by the risen
Christ. It is the Spirit who heals the wounds of the heart, pulls down the
barriers that separate us from God and divide us from one another, and at the
same time, restores the joy of the Father's love and of fraternal unity.
Homily
of St. John Paul II,
Mass
of Canonization of Sr. Mary Faustina Kowalka,
April
30, 2000
These are the unmistakable signs of the
true Cross of Christ: serenity, a deep feeling of peace, a love which is ready
for any sacrifice, a great effectiveness which wells from Christ’s own wounded
Side. And always — and evidently — joy: a joy which comes from knowing that
those who truly give themselves are beside the Cross, and therefore beside Our
Lord.
Forge #772
St. Josemaría’s devotion to the living, crucified Jesus,
ignited by the painting of Sr. Maria Teresa but forged in private for 40 years,
was publicly manifested in 1975 with his commission of a bronze representation
of Jesus on the cross, alive and serene, which hangs in the Shrine of Our Lady
of Torreciudad in northern Spain.
Our Own Acceptance of
the Cross
Jesus grimacing in pain on the cross is easy to imagine.
Jesus overcoming his physical and moral suffering with such control over his
body and emotions that He serenely and joyfully embraces His Father’s will is
so far from our comprehension that He has to tell us Himself, multiple times.
This is the first part of the revelations to the French and Polish nuns. The
second is that we are to do likewise: “Love one another as I have loved you.”
The great revelations of the Father’s mercy of the 20th
Century emphasize that holiness, and we are all called to holiness, can only be
achieved by the serene and joyful embrace of whatever cross to which God the
Father has asked us to be nailed.
***
The inspiration for this article is the work of Federico M. Requena in Scripta Theologica (#35, 2003/2, 547-572) and Scripta et Documenta (#3, 2009, 139-174).
***
Tom McDonough’s most recent book is An Eye For Others, Dorothy Day, Journalist: 1916-1917. He blogs at The Shire With WIFI.
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