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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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Utente Gold


Questions about a most popular
contemporary Catholic devotion

I had not checked into Maureen Mullarkey’s blog for months, and when I did last week, not only did I find a couple of Bergoglio critiques,
as expected, but four posts in May and June about what she calls ‘the Faustina phenomenon’.

I was so struck by her observations and by information about this phenomenon that I had not previously known, that I put together
her 4 essays meaning to post it as a pertinent commentary on how myths are manufactured even in the holy business of canonization.
And to check my own ‘reception’ of the Divine Mercy cult which I had accepted - because who can argue about Divine Mercy, and because
St. Faustina and her story were so unequivocally endorsed by John Paul II - despite my misgivings about 1) the chaplet and 2) that
most pedestrian chant I first heard on an EWTN broadcast of a Divine Mercy Wednesday service, which immediately reminded me of that
gosh-awful WYD anthem that starts with “Jesus Christ, you are my life…’

But Fr. Z beat me to the punch and yesterday, he vented his own sentiments about ‘the Faustina phenomenon’ and its associated devotions.
Let me start with him and go on to Ms Mullarkey…


I’m cool towards a certain popular devotion
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

June 19, 2017

The often inflammatory Maureen Mullarkey has written several posts about her discomfort with the Divine Mercy devotion and chaplet.
She makes the point that I would make: I LONG for Divine Mercy. I would add that I long for it probably not knowing how much I truly need it and, were I to truly understand my need, I might quite simply die. So, praying for it can’t be bad. As a matter of fact, it is a sine qua non of my life.

That said: I can’t warm up to this devotion. I’m a convert and I took to the Rosary as if I had said it all my life. But this one… nope. And I have asked myself why for years.

“But Father! But Father!”, some of you readers are asking along with the spittle-flecked nutty libs, “If you are Catholic you HAVE TO love this! It’s just… the BEST! I mean mercy is so… soooo…. Don’t you understand how wonderful it is? It’s on EWTN!!! Do you really HATE VATICAN II?!? (‘YES! He DOES!’, shout the libs.)”

Sorry, I just can’t warm up to it. And I prefer the Sunday after Easter to be Dominica in albis, just as it has always been. Quasimodo Sunday. Does that exclude “Divine Mercy” as a focus? No, of course it doesn’t. Don’t have a spittle-flecked nutty.

What is it that puts me off this devotion? Perhaps it is that saccharin soul-annihilating chant with which the chaplet sung. Please JUST KILL ME! Perhaps it is the dreadful art that goes with it. Alas, I can’t un-see it… with it’s pastels. Perhaps it is the invasion of that dreadful art into sanctuaries, HUGE cheesy prints among the potted plants propped up near altars as if it were some equal fixture that I don’t care for.

And I even like some of that old fashioned, even sugary devotional art because – yes, it’s kinda corny – but it stems from true love. I don’t mind the sweet stuff about Our Lady of Fatima or our Guardian Angels (though I picture them as something quite different).

To obtain mercy is there something lacking in the recitation of the Rosary? Is there something missingin the devotion to the Sacred Heart? They work for me, thank you very much. They’ve worked for a loooong time.

Maureen has some choice quotes from her musings which, in part, give voice to some aspects of my lack of enthusiasm for the Divine Mercy chaplet (especially).
Namely…

 As anecdotal evidence goes, there seem to be more Catholics uneasy with the Faustina engine — fueled as it is on syrup — than I had expected.
 My essay said nothing about feminized priests. It mentioned only the painting of a feminized Jesus, cloaked in a gauzy haze and drained of virility.
 Faustina’s visions conjure a feminized Jesus — a kitchen table Jesus drained of masculinity; one who feels, who talks about his feelings as a woman would. Worse, He Who spoke the universe into existence speaks to Faustina in the phrasings of a dime novel.
 Ignatius of Loyola advised his followers to steer clear of women: “All familiarity with women was to be avoided, and not less with those who are spiritual, or wish to appear so.” The militant Ignatius, a “new soldier for Christ,” grasped something that we moderns in the West dislike admitting: A feminized Church is a weak institution. It puts soft devotions ahead of the Cross.
 The words of Domenico Bartolucci (d. 2013), the last great Chapel Master of the Sistine Chapel Choir, resound more compellingly with each passing year: “Gregorian chant was born in violent times, and it should be manly and strong, and not like the sweet and comforting adaptations of our own day.”
What Cardinal Bartolucci said of chant and polyphony applies as well to our devotions. The Jesus of our devotional life should also be manly and strong. The grand nature of the Christian claim diminishes in any devotion—however popular—that depicts a plaintive Jesus who drops by with a fail-proof recipe for redemption. And who dramatizes his feelings the way a woman might.


Mind you, I have not made a detailed study of the writings of St. Faustina, [It is about these writings that Mullarkey makes what to me are her most thought-provoking arguments] but what I have read did not keep me reading eagerly. I’m sure that there are some bits that are great and others that are not so great.

Perhaps the chaplet is more of a female thing than a male thing, I don’t know. Maureen seems to think so, and, from what I gather from her tone, she doesn’t think that that’s good for the Church as a whole. If I read her right, she thinks its popularity is a symptom of a feminized Church. Is she right?

All I know is that I don’t care to use that particular devotion. If other people want to, hey, great. I know that men seem to like reciting the Rosary with other men.

I wonder if my coolness is influenced by my old pastor and mentor the late and famed Msgr. Schuler. Maybe he steered me away from this devotion. He was right about the NeoCats and the Legion and several other things that have, over time, proven to be a bust. Schuler didn’t have time for the Divine Mercy Chaplet. The Rosary was good enough for him, as he would say. I must say, if it was good enough for him, then it’s good enough for me. “… then it’s good enough for me”, which reminds me of something…. [Fr Z goes on to propose a rousing chant for the Church Militant…]

To put it all in context, this is how I introduced Divine Mercy Sunday when I still kept up a sort of daily almanac on the Forum:


The Second Sunday of Easter, eighth day of the Octave, was earlier observed as the Sunday of St. Thomas the Apostle, commemorating his contact with the Risen Christ, but it is now Divine Mercy Sunday.
Second Sunday of Easter
Divine Mercy Sunday



Divine Mercy Sunday is based on the Catholic devotion that Saint Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938) advocated from her mystic conversations
with Jesus. He asked her to paint the vision of his Merciful Divinity being poured from his sacred heart and specifically asked for a feast
of Divine Mercy to be established on the first Sunday after Easter so mankind would take refuge in Him. The Divine Mercy devotion was
actively promoted by Pope John Paul II who, on April 30, 2000, canonized Sr. Faustina and officially designated the Sunday after Easter as
the Sunday of Divine Mercy in the General Roman Calendar. A year after establishing Divine Mercy Sunday, John Paul II re-emphasized its
message in the resurrection context of Easter: "Divine Mercy is the Easter gift that the Church receives from the risen Christ and offers
to humanity". Providentially, he died on the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday in 2005, and was beatified on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2011.


So here’s Ms. Mullarkey, and fair warning: Readers familiar with her, as well as those encountering her prose for the first time, may find themselves offended by her thoughts and her words. Be prepared for naked honesty here… BTW, I have no guarantee that anything Ms. Mullarkey writes here about St. Faustina is accurate, but I trust that as a practicing Catholic and a professional artist and writer, she is hardly likely to make false claims. Anyway, anyone is free to check out her facts.

Notes on the Faustina phenomenon

May 16, 2017

After hearing my confession, a gentle, elderly priest granted absolution and, for my penance, imposed the chaplet of Divine Mercy. I cringed. Oh, please, not that! Like the bargaining murderer in Alfred Hitchock’s I Confess, I negotiated the penance. I blurted out something about revulsion for the self-regarding jumble of Faustina’s supernatural stenography. I wanted nothing to do with the cult of Faustina and her preposterous painting commission. Please, Father, give me a different penance.

A mild man, he obliged. He rescinded the chaplet and sent me to the rosary instead. Thinking about it afterwards, I realized that it had been a mistake for me to balk. Reciting the chaplet would, indeed, have been a true penance, as irritating as a hair shirt.

Back in the confessional with the same priest some time later, I was sentenced again to a chaplet. This time I kept quiet and suffered my penalty.

The Faustina phenomenon is a scandal to me. The language of the “mercy messages” and the content of her visions—not least that gauzy, epicene Christ figure—are alien to my sense of the sacred. I shrink from the devotion, and even more from the pious industry that built and sustains it. The entire edifice leads to the unwelcome thought that canonizations, like encyclicals, have become papal products manufactured for institutional reasons apart from—in tension with, if not in contradiction to—the deposit of faith.

I believe in divine mercy, ache for it, with a whole heart. I rely on God’s pity for the fearsome reason that I believe in divine justice as well. Faustina’s visions conjure a feminized Jesus — a kitchen table Jesus drained of masculinity; one who feels, who talks about his feelings as a woman would. Worse, He Who spoke the universe into existence speaks to Faustina in the phrasings of a dime novel. Or an off-the-rack devotional tract.
Faith repels assent to Faustina’s Divine Mercy and the hackneyed astral fetish that expresses it.


The Christ Who bled His humanity out on a jagged timber is distorted, made grotesque, by the imaginings of an overwrought aspirant to sainthood — a woman who envisioned herself Jesus’s secretary “in this world and in the next.” As Jesus’s personal secretary, Faustina gained a leg up on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Missing from Faustina’s Diary is all hint of that humility rightly associated with an experience of the sacred: “My sanctity and perfection is based on the close union of my will with the will of God.” (Diary 1107) What holiness is there in presumption?

The swagger continues in an unseemly ambition to best her competition in the sainthood stakes: “My Jesus, you know that from my earliest years, I have wanted to become a great saint. That is to say, I have wanted to love you with a love so great that there would be no soul who has hitherto loved you so.” (Diary 1372)

Not just a saint, but a great one—the kind that is remembered and fêted? And no other soul so loving? Not even the woman who gave birth to Him or those who walked the earth alongside Him? If this is sanctity, there is a helluva lot of chutzpah in it.

Maria Faustina Kowalska [born Helena] of the Congregation of the Sisters of Divine Mercy, experienced her visions between 1931 and her death seven years later. She was deemed delusional or unbalanced by those who knew her most intimately: her fellow nuns, her Mother Superior, and her early confessors. But once the gears of myth-making begin to turn, skepticism is ground to dust. Good sense and the gleanings of familiar observation are dismissed as ignorance or inattention. Jesus’s rebuke to the Galileans is forgotten. Persistent lust for signs and wonders overrides the Gospel warning against them.

Jesus of Nazareth hid from those who would make him king. What are we to make of a vision in which He declares Himself “King of Mercy” and commissions a portrait of Himself like any profane crowned head?

Ignatius of Loyola advised his followers to steer clear of women: “All familiarity with women was to be avoided, and not less with those who are spiritual, or wish to appear so.” The militant Ignatius, a “new soldier for Christ,” grasped something that we moderns in the West dislike admitting: A feminized Church is a weak institution. It puts soft devotions ahead of the Cross.

Faustina’s diary and
the work of her editors

May 17, 2017

Pius XII was against Faustina’s apparitions before he was for them. He first distanced the Church from them by placing her writings on the Index of Forbidden Books (Index Liborum Prohibitorum). Notwithstanding, he blessed an image of the Divine Mercy in Rome in 1956.

The Holy Office [not yet renamed Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith] under John XXIII, suppressed the writings twice, the second time in 1959. The stay against Faustina’s diary and devotion to the image of Divine Mercy lasted until 1978, the year Karol Wojtyla was elected to the papacy.

According to the 2005 Marian Press edition of the Diary, the Marian Fathers in Poland had been promoting the devotion since the 1940s. Between 1979 and 1987, the men devoted themselves to a taffy-pull on Faustina’s manuscripts in order to shape them into acceptable revelatory goods.

Were the Marians engaged in promotion during the decades of suppression? No mention is made. Editorial comment leaps from the 1940s ahead to 1979. That year marked the beginning of an aggressive lobbying effort based on re-translating, re-writing, and re-editing the original documents.

This exercise in revision was offered to the faithful as an exemplary act of clarification. John Allen, in a 2002 essay “A Saint Despite Vatican Reservations,” described it this way:

Officially, the 20-year ban is now attributed to misunderstandings created by a faulty Italian translation of the Diary, but in fact there were serious theological reservations — Faustina’s claim that Jesus had promised a complete remission of sin for certain devotional acts that only the sacraments can offer, for example, or what Vatican evaluators felt to be an excessive focus on Faustina herself.


But John Paul II was anxious to fortify Polish Catholics with another saint. When he assumed the papacy, the Berlin Wall still stood. Poland’s anti-Communist labor movement was about to emerge as Lech Walesa’s Solidarity. The nationalist note in Faustina’s visions, no help to Poland in the Thirties, was made to order for the Seventies. Jesus reportedly told her: “I have loved Poland particularly. If she obeys my will, I will raise her up in power and sanctity. From her will come forth a spark that will prepare the world for my final coming.”

With no more than three or four years of schooling, Faustina might not have known that Jesus once declared His kingdom was not of this world. It was certainly not in Poland on the eve of Hitler’s invasion and the slaughter of over five million Poles.

Making saints is a political act, inextricable from the machinery of special interests. And the process can be just as unedifying. The 640-plus pages of her writing required revision to make the prose coherent and theologically acceptable. The Marian Press phrases the rescue this way:

A rigorous, scholarly analysis of her notebooks was necessary to extract from them everything which is considered essential to her mission. This work was accomplished by an eminent and highly esteemed theologian, the Rev. Professor, Ignacy Rózycki…


In other words, the Diary‘s promoters appointed a theologian to make a silk purse out of an inadmissable sow’s ear. Think of Justice Roberts “translating” the Affordable Care Act to salvage it from its failings. Like Obama’s ACA, Faustina’s diary is an artifact of purposeful editing.

Peter Scott, writing in The Angelus, June 2010, took particular exception to the pervasive presumption in Faustina’s Diary. Self-flattery is a characteristic contrary to the unpretentiousness of any true mystic. Illustrating that lack of humility is Faustina’s claim that Jesus told her: “Now I know that it is not for the graces or gifts that you love me, but because My will is dearer to you than life. That is why I am uniting Myself with you so intimately as with no other creature.” (§707).

Fr. Scott comments: “What pride, to believe such an affirmation, let alone to assert that it came from heaven.” He continues with instances of her tendency to praise herself by means of words reportedly spoken by Jesus:

Listen to this interior locution: “Blessed pearl of My Heart, I see your love so pure, purer than that of the angels . . . . For your sake, I bless the world.” (§1061). On May 23, 1937 she describes a vision of the Holy Trinity, after which she heard a voice saying: “Tell the Superior General to count on you as the most faithful daughter in the Order.” (§1130). It is hardly surprising that Sister Faustina claimed to be exempt from the Particular and General Judgments. On February 4, 1935, she already claimed to hear this voice in her soul: “From today on, do not fear God’s judgment, for you will not be judged.” (§374).
Add to this the preposterous affirmation that the host three times jumped out of the tabernacle and placed itself in her hands (§44) so that she had to open up the tabernacle herself and place it back in.


The Church does not oblige Catholics to believe any private visions. But that wise and gracious exemption is effectively undermined once the seer is declared a saint. By now, the reveries of a minimally literate young woman with a heated imagination have been enshrined. They are barricaded against demurral by canonization and the institutionalized incentive of indulgences.

Implicit in our complaints about secular culture is recognition of the Church’s loss of credibility in the modern world. If the phenomenon of Faustina reveals anything, it is that those who speak for the Church are not all blameless in the tilt toward secularism.


Three weeks later, Mullarkey revisited the subject because of some reader reactions.

A Reader’s Complaint, Part 1
June 12, 2017
It sometimes helps to know where something is headed before you get there. So this once, let me begin where the proctors of creative writing would tell me to end.

Here goes:

When the language of prayer or religious expression is used as a tool of ideology or pragmatic advancement it becomes a profanity. Pressed into service as an instrument of institutional pride, or any other cherished good, it loses its soul. Put to profane purposes — e.g. a means to preempt questions and short-circuit conscientious doubts, or as a bribe to observe questionable devotions —I t is an impiety. Pious boilerplate sins against both truth and justice when it is wielded like a stick to beat back reason or dangled like a carrot to induce assent where none — or little — belongs.

There. Now we can get started.

Reader’s comments are always instructive. What an individual reader has seized upon as worth mentioning makes plain how a topic — some point or argument — sounds to someone else.
Responses to previous postings on the Faustina drama were revealing. Before hitting the publish button on WordPress, I braced for complaints with a second cappuccino. (Extra hot milk on the side, please.) But hardly a grumble came. Quite the opposite. As anecdotal evidence goes, there seem to be more Catholics uneasy with the Faustina engine — fueled as it is on syrup — than I had expected.

But one cavil was interesting. It came from a man who objected to something completely askance of what I had written. He scolded:

Poland is still really Catholic. They have so many priests in some areas that they send them to the United States to make room. And these aren’t your feminized priests. These are masculine men that also happen to be serious about this devotion.


My essay said nothing about feminized priests. It mentioned only the painting of a feminized Jesus, cloaked in a gauzy haze and drained of virility. Nowhere did it question the masculinity of the Polish Marians who initiated promotion of Faustina’s diary. The question must have nagged subliminally at my respondent for him to have read it into the essay.

But now that someone has raised the subject, it claims attention. Along comes a thought I had not had before. It is this: What kind of men devote themselves to playing Pygmalion to a young, unschooled, histrionic female engaged in a challenge to Thérèsa of Lisieux — a fellow consumptive —f or the laurel of redemptive suffering? What moves ordained men to expend their priesthood on grooming delusional diary entries until they can pass, teased and re-translated, as divine revelation?

Contemporary Marians are not shy about declaring themselves “the official promoters of the authentic Divine Mercy message.” That is a publicist’s identity. How far does the manufacture and advancement of a sentimental cult conform to a priestly charism? Maybe you can answer that. I do not know how.

Contemporary Marians are an enterprising order. During the tenure of John Paul II, they built the grandiose Leichen Basilica. It is an ambitious Marian shrine intended to rival the Jasna Góra Monastery in Czestochowa. Founded in 1382, the monastery is a stunning historical monument, and home of the Black Madonna, a legendary icon. As Poland’s national shrine, it has long been the traditional heart of Polish Catholicism. Now, its upstart rival, the basilica, can boast of being the largest church in Poland. To what purpose?

Funded by donations raised in the heady aftermath of Communist suppression, the basilica is understandable as a post-Soviet assertion of Polish Catholic identity. Nonetheless, the ostentation of competitive shrine-building testifies less to faith than to politics. In the end, it is a monument set on sand.

Political orders tack and bend in the wind. As the Church loses control of the moral climate, no massive building project will reestablish the old authority. Neither will a novel private devotion cobbled together to shore up institutional health.

In July, 2012, Der Spiegel reported on the Church’s rapidly declining influence on a fast-changing nation:

…Once considered the most Catholic country in Europe, the faithful are vanishing.
Some 95 percent of all Poles still say that they are Catholic. Yet loyalty to the church is waning. Even the conservative Catholic publicist Tomasz Terlikowski estimates the true number of devout Catholics at little more than 20 percent. “We Poles like to proclaim our Catholicism,” he says, but the reality looks quite different.”

[Terlikowski is more than a publicist. He is a journalist, philosopher, prolific author, and station manager of Telewizja Polska, Poland’s largest television network.]

Der Spiegel expands on that reality:

Only slightly more than 44 percent of young people say they go to church on Sundays, compared with 62 percent in 1992. Forty-two percent admit that they do not observe all religious commandments. Hardly anyone pays attention to rules about things like sexual abstinence before marriage anymore.


The article does not mention the source of its numbers. Did Der Spiegel overstate its case? It would seem not. Two years later, Matthew Day, writing from Warsaw for The Telegraph, also reported on the dramatic decline in church-going. He quoted from the Church’s own inquiry:

An official survey by the Polish Catholic church found that in the last 10 years the number attending Sunday mass has fallen by around two million, and that on average only 39 per cent of the population now attend church: the first time the figure has been below 40 per cent since 1980. The drop was described as “significant” by Father Wojciech Sadlon, director of the Catholic Church Institute of Statistics, the body that carried out the research…

Lifestyles on Sundays have changed. Faith is losing out to other ‘offers’ such as people spending time with friends and family, as well as just sitting in front of the TV as an individual. People who often came to church were motivated by an attachment to tradition and a culture given to them by their family, but this is no longer enough to sustain them and so they gradually cease to attend.


It all brings to mind François Mitterand’s Grands Projects. An architectural initiative intended to memorialize France as the consummate capitol of Europe, the gesture is fast coming to represent the capitol of Eurabia.
Ozymandias must be grinning in his grave.

Dreary apparitions (Complaints, Part 2)
June 19, 2017

Credulity is not a virtue. Nor is it a compliment to faith. Paul advised us to be always ready with a cogent answer “to every man that asketh you a reason for the hope that is in you.” (1 Peter 3:15) His words emphasize faith’s footing in rationality. The faith is to be defended in accord with reason and logic.

Admittedly, reason is chastened by its own limits. As Paul wrote to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” There is no acid test for “the evidence of things not seen.” But, following Paul, the search for understanding cannot — must not — be abandoned to sentimental mystification. It is to be articulated, made graspable, not wrapped in gauze. Not surrendered to consoling fictions.

Please understand, the piety of Maria Faustina Kowalska is not the issue. Neither is the merit or sincerity of Catholics who have adopted the Divine Mercy devotion. What matters is the integrity of the devotion’s promulgation and the sensibility it encourages.

An irritated reader suggests that my skepticism toward the cult of Faustina indicates . . . how to put it? . . . a deficiency in my Catholicism. She wonders why I bother. The answer is simple: Giving oxygen to credulity weakens the Church. The Divine Mercy devotion, no less than the franchise built on it, is inseparable from the content of Faustina’s imaginings. The machinery of it makes the Church’s teaching function appear incoherent —as disjointed as the culture it is commissioned to evangelize. The specter of implausibility hanging over the whole opera weakens Church authority among those most in need of trust in it.

We watch our civilization’s slow abandonment of Christianity. We witness the Church’s loosened grip on the moral climate. We mourn lessening of faith in the Real Presence. We lament the displacement of modern man’s religious impulses onto messianic environmentalism. All the while, we cast blame everywhere outside of ourselves. In that way, we make ourselves partners in underwriting faded authority with an effortless devotion rooted in improbable apparitions. It is a self-defeating subsidy.

The words of Domenico Bartolucci (d. 2013), the last great Chapel Master of the Sistine Chapel Choir, resound more compellingly with each passing year: “Gregorian chant was born in violent times, and it should be manly and strong, and not like the sweet and comforting adaptations of our own day.”

What Cardinal Bartolucci said of chant and polyphony applies as well to our devotions. The Jesus of our devotional life should also be manly and strong. The grand nature of the Christian claim diminishes in any devotion —however popular — that depicts a plaintive Jesus who drops by with a fail-proof recipe for redemption. And who dramatizes his feelings the way a woman might.

Faustina’s Jesus gossips and plays favorites. He flatters and complains. He exhibits the emotionalism women would like men to have. He confesses his feelings (“The flames of mercy are burning Me—clamoring to be spent.”) He is as overbearing and guilt-inducing as Sophie Portnoy. (“If you neglect the matter of the painting of the image and the whole work of mercy, you will have to answer for a multitude of souls on the day of judgment.”) He discards masculine reticence and whines: “Distrust on the part of souls is tearing at My insides… Even My death is not enough for them.”

A deformation intrudes on more than one Diary entry. To illustrate, on a day Faustina was lying in the infirmary, a visiting Jesuit brought Communion to the ill sisters. Thinking Faustina was the last communicant, he gave her two hosts. None was left for a novice unnoticed in the next cell. Realizing his mistake, the priest went back for another host. But he need hardly have troubled. Jesus confided to Faustina his aversion to the overlooked novice:
“I enter that heart unwillingly. You received those two Hosts, because I delayed My coming into this soul who resists My grace. My visit to such a soul is not pleasant for me.

It is a petty, miserly statement. Why would Catholics lend credence to it as coming from the incarnate God who is generosity itself? And who loves even those unworthy of divine largesse? How can we credit a Jesus who, in 1936, responds to Faustina’s prayers for the people of Russia with the same spiteful inflection and a veiled threat: “ “I cannot suffer that country any longer. Do not tie My hands, My daughter.”

What are we to think of a Jesus who commissions a portrait of himself (“painted with a brush”) to supplant the cross as the ultimate symbol of mercy? How much sustenance can a secular world, however thirsty, discover in Faustina’s fantasy life? What are the plugged-in riders on Amtrak or the crosstown bus to believe about the transcendent origin of 600-plus pages of treacle mining? How much credit should any of us lend to an unscriptural Jesus who trumps the Eucharist with his own portrait? And in exorbitant tones:

I promise that the soul that will venerate this image will not perish. . . I Myself will defend it as My own glory.


Faustina’s 'Diary' constructs a Jesus looking for payback. Recompense. (“My daughter, your love compensates me for the coldness of many.”) Is this how the Word wishes to be known by us?

The original 1934 Divine Mercy painting hangs in the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy in Lagiewniki, a suburb of Krakow. The painter Eugene Kazimirowski set to work in the manner of a police sketch artist — translating onto canvas the image in Faustina’s mind. Her mind’s eye was fixed on Saint-Sulpice-style images of the Sacred Heart, with which she was familiar. To lend verisimilitude to a patently derivative composition, Faustina’s spiritual director, Fr. Michael (Michal) Sopocko sat in for Jesus during painting sessions. In short, the painting is not a portrait of Jesus at all. It is a pastiche: part copy of 19th century religious kitsch, part portrait of the priest who got the bandwagon rolling.

I takes nothing from John Paul II's sainthood that he may have been honestly duped by the Faustina phenomenon as he would be duped later about Fr. Maciel. Sainthood obviously does not mean human perfection - and if St. Faustina's account of her visions of the Lord have brought even just one soul to eternal salvation, then she has fulfilled her apostolate, however deceptive it may have been.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/06/2017 22:29]
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