A Reflection on God’s Infinite Mercy this Easter Season | Word and Songs Podcast with Sr. Lines Salazar, fsp

A Reflection on God’s Infinite Mercy this Easter Season | Word and Songs Podcast with Sr. Lines Salazar, fsp #WordAndSongs #DivineMercy #EasterSeason2023 Divine Mercy Sunday has been celebrated for years as a private devotion. But in the year 2000, April 30 to be exact, the first Sunday after Easter, Saint John Paul II, who himself was an extraordinary instrument of God’s mercy, put this feast on the Church’s official calendar as he raised Sister Faustina Kowalska to sainthood. In his homily of canonization, John Paul joyfully announced that the first Sunday after Easter “from now on throughout the Church will be called ‘Divine Mercy Sunday.’” Pope Francis, in his apostolic letter, Face of Mercy or Misericordiae Vultus, singles out St. Faustina, whom he refers to as “the great apostle of Divine Mercy,” and invokes her intercession saying: “May she, who was called to enter the depths of divine mercy, intercede for us and obtain for us the grace of living and walking always according to the mercy of God and with an unwavering trust in his love. Saint Faustina was a member of the Congregation of Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Krakow, Poland. She died in 1938. She came from a simple and poor family of farmers, had only three years of simple education, and performed the humblest of tasks in her convent. But she also was a mystic who was privileged to have many private revelations from our Lord which she recorded in her diary of Divine Mercy. the “true and proper meaning of mercy,” as St. Pope John Paul II told us, is God’s love drawing “good from all the forms of evil existing in the world and in man.” Even in the midst of the darkness of sin and evil that we still experience in our world today (the persecution of Christians in many parts of the world, the evil of drugs and human trafficking, the many displaced refugees fighting for their lives and their families because of war, particularly in Ukraine and Russia) – as Christians, we believe that God has a way drawing out good even in the seemingly negative and horrendous experience of these people. We believe that God who is our Creator, Redeemer, and sanctifier is still in control in the midst of evil happening in the world. We have to say, therefore, that mercy (in John Paul’s words), is “the fundamental content of the messianic message of Christ. . . .” It is, in fact, the basic power of His mission on earth. By the power of Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection – He has already saved us from sin and death... And we believe that he will continue to save us now from the terrors and horrors of this world’s evil forces. To bring the meaning of mercy into ultimate focus, we must say that Jesus Christ incarnates mercy; indeed, Jesus Christ is mercy.