Today is the feast of the Divine Mercy, also called Mercy Sunday.
The Divine Mercy Sunday which falls on the eighth day after Easter, sums up the whole Pascal mystery of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection and also the great graces available to all in the celebration of His mercy.
Devotees since the last Holy Week had been going to confession in order to receive Holy Communion to obtain the Lord’s promise of complete pardon of sins and punishment.
The faithful, as demanded by Jesus Christ, will do works of mercy before or during the feast while priests are obliged to extol the great mercy of God in their homilies.
This popular devotion, observed every first Sunday after Easter as the Lord demanded to St. Faustina, was officially declared by the late Pope now St. John Paul II in 2000 during the canonization of St. Faustina Kowalska.
St. Faustina was the late Polish nun and mystic to whom the Lord Jesus Christ had appeared, conversed, and handed down the blueprint of the devotion to His mercy and important urgent messages to mankind found in her 600-page spiritual diary titled “Divine Mercy in My Soul.” (Jose Ma. Boni Escoda)
