By praying the Chaplet of Divine Mercy together, we intercede for the world before the Father, through the Son, in the power of their Holy Spirit. We ask God to have mercy on the world and on us. Yesterday, Pope Leo held a Rosary Vigil for peace Saint Peter’s Basilica. At same time locally, there was a Rosary procession in Salt Lake City, which began and ended at our cathedral. This gathering is an extension of the Holy Father’s vigil.
In a memorandum issued last Thursday, Bishop Solis directed that in all prayerful gathering of the faithful in our diocese this Divine Mercy Sunday, we pray for peace throughout the world and for respect for human dignity of migrants and for their safety. In obedience our bishop, this Chaplet of Divine Mercy is offered for those two intentions. Of course, it is right and fitting to add your own intentions to these communal intentions, just as at Mass.
Evil is real. I am not sure I agree with the assertion that evil is merely a lack. Evil seems to me, at least at times, to have some substance. In a world full of chaos and uncertainty, where, as Pope Leo noted in his new year’s address to the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, war, with all its concomitant suffering, seems to once again be in vogue. This causes many to wonder if evil has any limit.
Toward the end of his life, Pope Saint John Paul II, who was instrumental in Saint Faustina’s canonization and who established the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday, wrote about the limit God imposes on evil.
John Paul II insisted you can’t “think of the limit placed by God himself upon the various forms of evil without reference to the mystery of Redemption.” He then asked, “Could the mystery of Redemption be the response to that historical evil which, in different forms, continually recurs in human affairs?” Before jumping too quickly to give a facile answer to a complex question, he annunciated some of the evils. All too easily, he insisted, we can come to see
the evil of concentration camps, of gas chambers, of police cruelty, of total war, and of oppressive regimes - evil which, among other things, systematically contradicts the message of the Cross - it can seem...that such evil is more powerful than any goodHe then urged us to pay close attention to history. Doing so, “we discover that this is precisely where the victorious presence of Christ's Cross is most clearly revealed.” Against a dark background the light shines forth more brightly. For “those subjected to systematic evil, there remains only Christ and his Cross as a source of spiritual self-defense, as a promise of victory.”
According to John Paul II, it is the Cross of Christ that “marks the divine limit placed upon evil, it is for this reason only: because thereby evil is radically overcome by good, hate by love, death by resurrection.”1
It is only by bearing your cross daily and giving your life in loving service to others that you can experience resurrection, that is, in the words of Saint Augustine to the wealthy Roman widow Proba, life that is truly life!
Take courage, by His death and resurrection, Christ conquered evil and death. By His passion, death, and resurrection, Christ not only responds to all the evil in world, He vanquishes it. Christus resurrexit, quia Deus caritas est - Christ is resurrected because God is love.
1 All citations from John Paul II. Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of the Millennium, 19-20. Random House: 2005.↩
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