Divine Mercy: The Heart of the Gospel

“My name is sacrifice” : The Mission of Blessed Faustina 87 “My name is sacrifice” : The Mission of Blessed Faustina This soul, capable o f such radiant joy, shows the way in which love becomes incarnate. Towards a Passiology of the Saints The word “sacrifice” once dominated Catholic consciousness: whether in the Mass, in personal spirituality or in the theology o f litur­ gy (cf. Hebrews). The word has come upon hard times in recent decades, the very concept eluding our grasp. Yet sacrifice as “vicarious suffering” (what in German is more clear: Stellvertretung , “taking the place” or “representing”) remains an unavoidable reality for the Catholic. Understanding such suffering is especially important in any attempt to reappropriate the Faith in an age in which a wonderful rediscovery o f the Word has yet at times degener­ ated into a denial o f the Word made Flesh and offered as sacrifice in the Eucharist. The heart o f such a reappropriation is the reunion of “dogmatic” with “spiritual” theology, as magisterially promulgated by Hans Urs von Balthasar.1As is well known, he considered the split between “sitting” and “kneeling” theologies, the separation of theology and holiness, to be the worst disaster to ever befall Christianity. Balthasar observed that after the first millennium theologians were less and less frequently saints, while saints were less and less frequently theologians. Mystical theology became a study o f inner states of the mystics themselves while the divine reality was left to the dogmatists, themselves bereft o f “expe­ rience” o f divine things and increasingly divorced even from faith let alone holiness. In such a scenario, the academic study o f religion emerges while any real theology must seek refuge in the cloister. In his seminal work on Therese of Lisieux and Elizabeth o f Dijon, Schwestern im Geist , Balthasar forged a path toward reconciling theol­ ogy and holiness, examining in detail the theological missions o f these two saints. This paper, looking primarily at Blessed Faustina Kowalska hopes to be a small contribution to this effort.