By JOSE MARIA ESCODA
Today is the feast of Divine Mercy or 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 the great graces available to all in the celebration of His mercy.
Devotees since 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 declared official by then Pope 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 the 600-page spiritual diary of the Saint “Divine Mercy in My Soul.”
Jesus Christ in the 1930s told St. Faustina: “I desire that the Feast of Mercy be a refuge and shelter for poor sinners. On that day the very depths of my tender mercy are open. I pour out a whole ocean of graces upon the souls who approach the fountain of My mercy. The soul that will go to confession and receive Holy Communion will obtain complete pardon of sins and punishment. Though its sins be as scarlet, I will turn them white as snow.”
Due to the inconvenience of going to confession during the Feast, Church officials allowed the devotees to go to confessions even five days earlier.
Regarding confession the Lord said: “When you go to confession, to the tribunal of My mercy, the blood the blood and water which came forth from My heart always flows down upon your soul. In the tribunal of My mercy (The sacrament of Reconciliation)…the greatest miracles take place and incessantly repeated. Here the misery of the soul meets the God of Mercy.”
