Mercy Sunday Around The Corner . . . Pastor Recalls How One Man Learned Of Its Emissary, St. Faustina

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — A Phoenix pastor recalled that when he held a similar position at a Catholic church in suburban Mesa, Ariz., a man came to him bearing a letter from Phoenix Diocesan Bishop Thomas Olmsted, saying to take this man seriously.
The man, a retired Scottsdale, Ariz., attorney, recounted that he had been on a cruise ship just pulling out of port in Florida when he “had a massive heart attack” that left him clinically dead, but responders brought him back to life, the pastor told a Zoom meeting of the Institute of Catholic Theology (ICT) here on March 6.
Once he was in the hospital, the man, who had attended church only on Christmas and Easter, was visited by an old priest wearing tattered clothes, but the man at first feigned being asleep before deciding to call out and say he felt he was a failure as a Catholic, the Phoenix pastor told the Zoom meeting.
The pastor, Fr. Steve Kunkel, said the retired attorney said the old priest recommended that he recite the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, the devotional practice calling upon the mercy of Jesus that was revealed by Polish St. Faustina Kowalska — and praying this way made him feel much better.
Later, when this attorney tried to find out who the old priest was, neither the hospital nor area churches could identify him, Kunkel said, until one day he happened to see a photo of the Polish friar St. Maximilian Kolbe and exclaimed, “That’s the priest!”
Kolbe had been martyred by the National Socialists in 1941 at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The retired attorney was so impressed that he decided to donate an image of Jesus as the Divine Mercy to every church in the Diocese of Phoenix, Kunkel said.
Kunkel told about this experience as he made a presentation to the ICT about St. Faustina and the wide-ranging effects of her life as a humble nun bringing the message of Jesus’ remarkable mercy before she died at age 33 due to health problems in 1938, shortly before World War II began.
The ICT is an evangelization program based at St. Thomas the Apostle Church here, where Kunkel is pastor and which has an image of the Divine Mercy next to the pulpit.
St. Faustina, born in 1905 as the third of 10 children, had the birth name of Helena but chose Faustina as her religious name, meaning “the happy one,” said Kunkel, who added that at age seven she felt a calling to become a nun when she was at an exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.
Kunkel said people ask him as a pastor if it’s really a good idea to bring children from their classrooms to spend time in the church building for exposition, and he replies, “Yeah, of course it is.” He cited Protestant converts to Catholicism telling him that they felt a Presence when they walked into a Catholic church that they didn’t feel elsewhere.
Despite the vocational calling that Faustina felt, Kunkel said, her family was poor and her father was a carpenter and peasant, so as she grew up she was asked to hold a job and give the family some of her earnings.
However, when Helena at age 18 was at a dance in 1923 in the city of Lodz, Kunkel said, Jesus appeared to her “covered in agonizing wounds” and asked, “How long will you keep putting me off?”
Deeply impressed, she went straight to a church and prayed, and heard a voice telling her to go to a convent in Warsaw, 85 miles away, Kunkel said, so, with only the clothes on her back, she took a train to Warsaw.
Upon arriving there, Kunkel said, the first church she saw bore the name of St. James, the patron of pilgrims, where a priest, informed of Helena’s need to find a convent, told her to stay with a certain woman until she succeeded in her search, but she initially was turned down in applying to a religious house. Then the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy agreed to receive her if she would pay for her own religious garb.
She worked there as a cook, a gardener, and a porter, said Kunkel, who told of an incident one day at the convent when a young man in pouring rain asked for something to eat, and after Faustina gave him hot soup and bread, he turned out to be Jesus, who came there “to taste the fruits of your mercy.”
In her diary, Kunkel said, she describes numerous encounters with Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Satan, angels and demons, and she originally thought these apparitions were usual experiences for people.
In 1930 Faustina arrived in the city of Plock, after which Jesus appeared to her in the image of the Divine Mercy, Kunkel said. Also here the first sign of her illness became present, which later was thought to be tuberculosis.
If a sinner turned to His mercy, Jesus said, “the just hand of God will not lay hold of him,” Kunkel said.
Various images of the Divine Mercy came to be painted, all showing the same basic picture of a bearded man in a white robe with his right hand raised in blessing, and red and pale rays emanating from the area of His heart. Kunkel said three such images were approved, although Faustina herself saw only the first one.
Because neither she nor other nuns had the ability to paint the image, an artist was commissioned to follow Faustina’s direction, but she was sad that the result didn’t show the Lord as beautiful as He is, said Kunkel, adding that most viewers don’t find the depiction of the expression on Jesus’ face in this first painting to be “gracious and merciful.”
Also, the first two paintings have the rays of mercy going downward, while a third painting has them coming out toward the viewer, Kunkel said.
In 1935 the first Mass was offered where the Divine Mercy image was displayed, he said, and Faustina wrote about the Chaplet of Divine Mercy devotion after an inner voice taught her how to pray it.
Kunkel said she saw a vision of an angel who was to chastise the world, but he was helpless to do so because of the power of the mercy.
Jesus told Faustina of 14 promises attached to saying the chaplet, one of which is that the souls of even hardened sinners who pray it will find peace, and they’ll have a happy death, Kunkel said, adding that the Lord asked for the first Sunday after Easter to be observed as Divine Mercy Sunday.
(That request was to be granted in 2000 by Pope John Paul II. In 2021 the Feast of Divine Mercy occurs on Sunday, April 11, and is celebrated in many churches with a Mass or other observance.)
“My mercy is greater than your sins, and those of the whole world,” Kunkel said Jesus told Faustina.

Suffering For
The Souls Of Others

Before her death in 1938, Kunkel said, she predicted “a war, a terrible, terrible war.”
(This was fulfilled the following year with the beginning of WWII in Europe. Despite Jesus’s generous offers of mercy, people have to turn to Him with trusting confidence. He won’t force reception of His mercy on those who reject it or refuse to amend their lives.)
Part of Faustina’s message was, “Act in such a way that all those who come in contact with you will go away joyful,” Kunkel said.
Kunkel, who visited Poland, said he was struck by how Catholic that country actually is, “at least from what I saw,” including packed Masses and billboards for St. John Paul.
Jesus insisted “on her complete submission to God’s will, obedience toward superiors, and a life of suffering for the souls of others,” he said.
(There are various websites about the Divine Mercy. Kunkel didn’t recommend any specific one. One is thedivinemercy.org.)