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Divine Mercy Sunday
1 May 2011
Dear Friends in Christ,
1. Today at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City (9.30 am Rome time; 3.30 am local time), Pope Benedict XVI declared his predecessor, John Paul II, to be beatus or blessed — meaning that the Church knows as a dogmatic fact that Karol Wojtyla now enjoys the beatific vision of God’s glory and that from the Throne of Grace he now intercedes for the Church on earth and the Church in purgatory. This is the first time in more than 1,000 years that a reigning pope has beatified his immediate predecessor, a fact that indicates the singular place of John Paul the Great in the life of the Church. To understand the life and ministry of Blessed John Paul, I recommend that you read carefully the two volume biography written by George Weigel. The first volume, published in 1999 is Witness to Hope, and the second volume, published in 2010, is The End and the Beginning. The feast day of Blessed John Paul will be 22 October, the date on which he solemnly inaugurated his service as Bishop of Rome, and this means that the sacred liturgy each October will be enriched by the feasts of two great Christian witnesses of the modern era: Blessed John Henry Newman on 9 October and Blessed John Paul the Great on 22 October.
2. The Divine Mercy devotion will be celebrated this afternoon at 3 pm at both St. Rafka Church on Highway 14 in Greer and at Our Lady of the Rosary Church on Augusta Road.
3. This coming Friday, 6 May, is the opening day of the film There Be Dragons, an account of the persecution of the Church during the Spanish Civil War by the acclaimed director Roland Joffee. Here in Greenville, the film will be shown at Regal Hollywood 20 on Woodruff Road, and tickets are available right after Mass today, at the website www.upstatedragons.com, and at the box office. Picking up your tickets today or by using the website will assist the local Catholics who made it possible for the film to be shown in Greenville.
4. On Monday of this week, 2 May, the Church keeps the feast of one of the great heroes of the Catholic Faith: St. Athanasius, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. Athanasius was Patriarch of Alexandria (one of the five great original dioceses of the universal Church) for forty-five years (from 328 to 373), but during seventeen of those years, he was in exile five different times, and the reason for his exile was that Athanasius often stood alone in the Church against the heresy of Arianism, the false teaching about the Lord Jesus propagated by a charismatic but heretical Alexandrian priest named Arius. Take some time this week to read about this remarkable defender of the Catholic Faith in the Catholic Encyclopedia at www.newadvent.org.
Father Newman