prayer that can be offered for victims who may not otherwise be rescued or able to be assisted. It truly becomes their “last hope of salvation,” as declared by Our Lord, and a means of hope and consolation for those related to them. Praying the Chaplet for those seriously injured and dying in tragedies makes them become powerful instruments of God’s saving grace. God’s Powerful Final Grace of Mercy We look to what St. Faustina tells us about caring spiritually for the dying and this gives us great hope. “I often attend upon the dying, and through entreaties obtain for them trust in God’s mercy, and I implore God for an abundance of divine grace, which is always victorious. God’s mercy sometimes touches the sinner at the last moment in a wondrous and mysterious way. Outwardly, it seems as if everything were lost, but it is not so. The soul, illumined by a ray of God’s powerful final grace, turns to God in the last moment with such a power of love that, in an instant, it receives from God forgiveness of sin and punishment, while outwardly it shows no sign either of repentance or of contrition, because souls [at that stage] no longer react to external things. Oh, how beyond comprehension is God’s mercy! Although a person is at the point of death, the merciful God gives the soul that interior vivid moment, so that if the soul is willing, it has the possibility of returning to God”(1698). Realizing that God’s mercy is infinite and incomprehensible, what St. Faustina is telling us is that God directly intervenes with the soul, giving the soul the last chance for true contrition and salvation, despite the fact that no sacramental Confession or the Anointing of the Sick was possible. 29
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