Pope Francis’ Divine Mercy Plans Pay Tribute to Sts. John Paul II and Faustina

National Catholic Register, 18 April 2020

The Holy Father’s Sunday visit to the Church of Santo Spirito takes place 20 years after the canonization of St. Faustina and 15 years after the death and funeral of St. John Paul II.

Pope Francis has said that the pandemic restrictions have made him feel caged. So he is heading out for Divine Mercy Sunday, but just a short walk from St. Peter’s Square, to the Church of Santo Spirito in Sassia, the Roman headquarters for the Divine Mercy devotion.

The Vatican announced on Thursday that the reason for the Holy Father’s visit is to mark the 20th anniversary of the canonization of St. Faustina Kowalska and the establishment of Divine Mercy Sunday. That’s true enough, but those decisions by St. John Paul II only took on their true depth at his death and funeral, the 15th anniversary of which we mark this month.

Those twin anniversaries are what Pope Francis wishes to highlight with his visit for a private Mass and recitation of the Regina Caeli at Santo Spirito this Sunday.

 First Saint of the Third Millennium

The papal itinerary for the Great Jubilee of 2000 was planned in painstaking detail. The only papal trips were to the biblical lands, with the sole exception of Fatima for May 13. There, John Paul beatified Jacinta and Francisco and revealed the “third secret” of Our Lady of Fatima, expressing the Holy Father’s view that his life had been spared on her feast day in 1981 so that he might lead the Church into the third millennium.

The canonizations were chosen carefully too, to highlight the witness of the martyrs. The Mexican martyrs would be canonized in May and the Chinese martyrs in October, setting off an immense row with communist Beijing. Two 20th-century women were canonized, the immensely wealthy Mother Katharine Drexel of Philadelphia, who put her family inheritance at the service of poor blacks and Native Americans, and, at the other end of the material spectrum, Sister Josephine Bakhita, the former Sudanese slave girl.

Pride of place, though, was given to St. Faustina Kowalska. John Paul firmly believed that she was a key saint for our current moment, “a gift of God for our time.”

“By divine Providence, the life of this humble daughter of Poland was completely linked with the history of the 20th century,” he noted in the canonization homily. “Through the work of this Polish religious, this message has become linked forever to the 20th century, the last of the second millennium and the bridge to the third.”

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