DIVINE MERCY IS FOR EVERYONE (first published in 'NZ Catholic', May 5-18)

 

‘Divine Mercy,’ I heard someone say recently, ‘is rather esoteric.’

The speaker was attempting to explain why at a major inner-city church, at the cathedral and a large suburban church in the same city, there was no celebration of the Feast granted to the universal Church by Blessed John Paul II when he canonised Mary Faustina Kowalska. This Polish nun had, under obedience, recorded Christ’s repeated requests for what the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments calls ‘a perennial invitation to the Christian world to face, with confidence in divine benevolence, the difficulties and trials that mankind will experience in the years to come’.

Now, (I sound like those Tv reporters, usually female, who preface their remarks with a school-marmish, ‘Now …’) mention of the Congregation will cause many a Catholic lip to curl in disdain, and mention of private revelations of the St Faustina kind (except maybe Fatima or Lourdes) will evoke a similar reaction.

But Divine Mercy Sunday fell the day ‘im indoors and I returned from Easter in Melbourne. I saw our son’s acquisition of an apartment in St Kilda as an opportunity to enjoy active participation in the liturgy as opposed to the usual hyper-active, and the Triduum, in three different churches (I walked to a fourth for the Vigil) culminated at the cathedral with Archbishop Denis Hart, a fine baritone, singing the Mass, magnificent organ music and boy choristers. ‘Im indoors, who once sang treble, cried. I cried too.

Maybe that Mass refreshed my vision. Because when at Melbourne airport I noticed a man in a wheelchair, I was disturbed by the realisation that we’d seen koalas, kangaroos and kookaburras in the wild but no wheelchairs, anywhere. I don’t know where Melburnians put their disabled but my next thought was, in future they’ll be even less in evidence. Because in Victoria, abortion’s legal right up to full-term and the death peddlers are organising the same here.

On the flight back to New Zealand were several passengers who might have required two seats each, and next day in the streets and cafes it seemed overweight people were everywhere. Mostly they were women. Are they eating and drinking to fill the vacuum once occupied by their unborn child? With surviving children raised by parents obsessed with food and drink (look at the space that takes in our magazines) how will we pay for the diabetes, hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, cancer, gallstones, gout and arthritis we’re letting ourselves in for?

Look overseas, at the US where kids get mown down in their classrooms by misfits with machine guns, or as in a recent incident, stabbed by a fellow student with an appetite for human flesh. Abroad, America’s politicking inadvertently makes bedfellows of North Korea, led by a megolamaniac with a fetish for atomic weaponry, and Iran, whose strangely similar rhetoric talks up World War III.

‘Esoteric’ means ‘designed for an inner circle of advanced disciples’. But it would seem Divine Mercy is needed by everyone.