Divine Mercy: The Heart of the Gospel

The Sacred Heart and The Divine Mercy 73 fourth great apparition to her (1675), He said: Behold this Heart that has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to show them its love. And in return I receive from most men only ingratitude, by their irreverences and sacrileges, and by the coldness and contempt which they show to Me in this Sacrament o f love... This is why I ask that the first Friday after the octave o f Corpus Christi shall be kept as a special Feast in honor o f My Heart, that on that day Communion shall be offered as a special ac t o f reparation for the indignities com­ mitted. And I promise that My Heart will pour out abundant­ ly the power o f its love upon those who pay i t ... honor.40 We should notice here that the Lord Jesus was quite specific in desir­ ing that this feast be a special act of “reparation,” in other words, on the basis o f Christ’s merits, a special return and offering o f love to Him to make up for the denial and betrayal o f His love implied by our sins. Like the traditional images of the Sacred Heart, therefore, the Feast is a spe­ cial call from the wounded Heart o f Jesus to “return love for love:” to love Him back, in reparation for all that His Heart has suffered from the sins o f thankless men and women 41 The liturgical Feast o f The Divine Mercy, however, which the Vatican has already approved for the bishops of Poland, is a feast o f the Heart o f Jesus with a different focus. It falls on the Sunday after Easter, which is the Octave Day of Easter. As we know from The Apostolic Constitutions, and the writings o f St. Augustine and St. Gregory Nazianzen, this day was always kept as a special feast by the ancient Church.42 It was known by them as “the Sunday in White” (Dominica in Albis) because those newly baptized at Easter wore their white bap­ tismal robes up through that day. St. Augustine called the whole octave “the days of mercy and pardon,” and the Sunday “the compendium of the days o f mercy.” Now revived as “Mercy Sunday,” this feast enables the Church to celebrate the merciful love o f Jesus Christ that flow s from His Sacred Heart, and that lies behind all the acts He has undertaken fo r our salvation. As Pope John Paul II said in his Regina Caeli address on Mercy Sunday in 1995, “the whole Octave of Easter is like a single day,” and the Octave Sunday is meant to be the day of “thanksgiving for the goodness God has shown man in the whole Easter mystery.”