From the Pastor’s Desk

On this Sunday after Easter we celebrate the Feast of Divine Mercy – a continuation of the Easter Week celebrations with a deliberate focus on the mercy of the Lord Jesus! This feast is born out of the tradition of the Church and the image of Divine Mercy, with instructions given to Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska as recorded in her Diary.

“The whole octave of Easter is like a single day.”

The Church celebrates the glory of Easter for eight days, officially called an octave, to pray and live within the grace of the Lord’s Resurrection. As Pope Saint John Paul II pointed out in his Regina Caeli address on Divine Mercy Sunday, 1995: “the whole octave of Easter is like a single day,” and the Octave Sunday is meant to be the day of “thanksgiving for the goodness God has shown to man in the whole Easter mystery.”
Divine Mercy Sunday is not a new feast. The Second Sunday of Easter was already a solemnity as the Octave Day of Easter; nevertheless, the title “Divine Mercy Sunday” highlights and amplifies the meaning of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus from the dead. In this way, it recovers an ancient liturgical tradition, reflected in a teaching attributed to St. Augustine about the Easter Octave, which he called “the days of mercy and pardon,” and the Octave Day itself “the compendium of the days of mercy.”
Pope Saint John Paul II, at the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Cracow, Poland on June 7, 1997, offers to us these words, on the power and necessity of the Mercy of God:
“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.”
May each of us celebrate the Mercy of God throughout the Easter Season,
Fr. Wilke