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Divine Mercy celebration set
archived from: 2013-03-22

To mark Divine Mercy Sunday, Bishop David Zubik will celebrate Mass at 3 p.m. April 7 at St. Bernard Church in Mount Lebanon.

Preceding the Mass will be recitation of the rosary at 2:30 p.m. After the Mass there will be adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and praying of the Divine Mercy chaplet.

Pope John Paul II inaugurated the annual feast of Divine Mercy Sunday, honoring devotion to Christ’s tender mercy for all humanity, for the Second Sunday of Easter in 2000, when he canonized St. Faustina Kowalska, the Polish nun and visionary.

Born Helen Kowalska to a poor peasant family in central Poland, St. Faustina entered the Warsaw convent of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in 1925. Afflicted with respiratory ailments for much of her life, Sister Faustina died of tuberculosis in the convent on Oct. 5, 1938, at age 33.

In her diary, published in English as “Divine Mercy in My Soul,” she wrote that she experienced God’s love for the first time at age 7, when he revealed to her divine things.

Revelations continued, and years later she witnessed her most famous vision: Jesus dressed in white, one hand raised in Benediction and the other resting on his breast, from which emanated two rays of light.

As she recorded in her diary several years later, Jesus asked her to paint the image she had seen and to have the painting blessed on the first Sunday after Easter, today known as Divine Mercy Sunday.

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