: O Before Fr. Jarzebowski launched his daring getaway, he made a solemn vow to promote the Divine Mercy message if God would allow him to escape occupied Poland. He made this bold promise only two years after St. Faustina died, this even though Fr. Joseph had up to that time been hesitant about working to spread the message of mercy. It was a classic "this-for-that" deal that urgency and desperation often force us to make with God. Unlike so many of us who write spiritual checks that God cannot cash because of our inadequate funds of thanksgiving, Fr. Joseph would prove himself to be a man of honor. The priest's journey of escape led him into a number of perilous situations that would do justice to a script for an action spy thriller. The circumstances of his safety do not skirt the improbable. They border on the miraculous. Father Joseph journeyed from Poland through Lithuania, Russia, Siberia, and Japan, before finally setting foot in San Francisco, Calif., four months later. Through his travels, amid the terrors of war and despite many hostile inspections from suspicious guards, Fr. Joseph was able to bring with him a copy of The Divine Mercy image hanging in St. Michael's Church in Vilno. He also carried copies of two documents written by St. Faustina's spiritual director and confessor, Fr. Michael Sopocko: the Second Memorial to the Polish Hierarchy, and a manuscript on the Feast of Divine Mercy. After this extraordinary journey and having arrived in San Francisco, Fr. Joseph took stock of his situation. He realized he had made it safely only because of help from The Divine Mercy. He then faced reckoning time, a squaring up of accounts. He had to deal with his end of the "bargain." It was probably the easiest life-alternating decision the priest ever had to make: from that moment on, Fr. Joseph dedicated himself to spreading the message and the devotion. No energy would be conserved, no expense unpaid in honor of his promise. The promise sweetened into ardor, his ardor into action, and his action into results. Father Joseph traveled to Washington, D.C., and then to Michigan. After a retreat he conducted for the Felician Sisters at their Motherhouse in Enfield, Conn., Fr. Joseph asked the Sisters if they would print in Polish The Divine Mercy Novena, Litany, and Chaplet. This modest, black-and-white edition - 2,000 copies in all - quickly sold out, and not long after, as Br. Michael Gaitley puts it in his compilation of Congregation history, "thanksgivings to Divine Mercy began to pour in. This outpouring led other Marians in America to dedicate themselves to spreading the devotion." At the Immaculate Conception novitiate in Stockbridge, Fr. Joseph established the Mercy of God Apostolate. The Apostolate grew into today's National Shrine of The Divine Mercy, spiritual home of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception in the U.S. and recognized as the headquarters of Divine Mercy in America. Father Joseph's harrowing journey to America in 1940 was a journey of love. His spirit of faith employed that love to turn fear into courage and darkness into light, a Light of Love that had to be the Holy Spirit holding up His end of the deal. Today, the pure Goodness that is God can be felt in every corner, in every grotto, and in every blade of grass on Eden Hill. That's why people come here, as they did to Lichen on Sept. 16 for the beatification of Fr. Stanislaus Papczynski. They come here for the Love of God, which is boundless Light. That they are able to come here at all must be attributed to the man honored by a statue on the holy ground of Our Lady of Lichen Shrine in Poland. Won't you all join me in a silent prayer of thanks to Fr. Joseph, whose presence still abides on Eden Hill. We who walk here do not walk alone. www.padrimariani.org Fr. Walter Pelczynski, MIC (l) and Fr. Jazebowski, MIC (r) www.thedivinemercy.org/articles/va ults
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