By Father Rich Tomkosky
The ultimate source of God’s mercy or His all-encompassing love for the human race and the desire for every person’s ultimate salvation – if we are willing to cooperate with our free will – is the saving Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ the eternal Son of God made man. Hence the Divine Mercy Novena each year begins on Good Friday and concludes on Divine Mercy Sunday. Hopefully we participated in this Novena and pray the chaplet each day.
In the Divine Mercy picture, Jesus has one foot moving toward us. It shows His active love. It also ties into the Sacred Heart.
To benefit from God’s mercy, two things need to happen:
- We must freely admit our sinfulness (the Sacrament of Confession).
- We have to Trust in Jesus’s power to forgive, heal & transform us over time.
No soul is beyond God’s power to forgive and heal. Many true stories of souls appearing to the saints and other holy people down through the ages show this.
In the very insightful book on the reality of Purgatory: Hungry Souls, it is striking how several of the souls who appeared were seemingly lost forever, e.g., people who have committed suicide, which is a horrible thing. Many of you were taught growing up that if a person committed suicide they basically automatically went to Hell. And on the surface that makes sense as taking one’s own life is an objectively a grave sin because one is rejecting the first great gift God gave us which is our life here on earth. But the Church has realized there are a number of complicated subjective factors in the human mind that go into such a misguided decision to take one’s own life. As the Catechism puts it, Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide. We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives.
By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives (pars, 2282-83). Offering Masses for such souls, as well as praying the Rosary (especially the Sorrowful Mysteries and the 7 Sorrows Rosary) and Divine Mercy chaplet for the grace of final repentance for souls who are in the process of dying from suicide each day as well as for those souls who are in Purgatory, often at the lower levels as noted in the book My Conversations with Poor Souls, is a supreme act of spiritual charity on our part.
And remember because God is outside of time, our prayers now can help a person who even committed suicide years ago hopefully come to repentance before they take their last breath here on earth. Saint Padre Pio prayed for a holy death for his great-grandfather who had died years earlier.
Never give up on souls as you live your faith with love and focus. One of the beautiful signs that we are having a second conversion is that we have a greater concern for the salvation not only of our own soul but for the souls of the people in our family, and social and school/work circle, as well as people we don’t even know.
If we don’t have any real concern for the spiritual well-being and salvation of others, it’s a sign our own faith is weak at best, and God is not real to us in a personal way.
Jesus through the gift of His Divine Mercy wants to change that. All we have to do is ask Him, and He will act upon us and others who are open to the grace over time though the power of the Holy Spirit. You see this reality in the lives of all the saints: they were willing to pray more, to suffer more, to expend more of their time and energy and resources to offer their life to God and for the salvation of souls as God sees fit based on their own life circumstances.
As Jesus said to Saint Faustina, so He says to us in similar ways if we are willing to be generous with Him, “My daughter, know that if I allow you to feel and have a more profound knowledge of My sufferings, that is a grace from Me. But when your mind is dimmed and your sufferings are great, it is then that you take an active part in My Passion, and I am conforming you more fully to Myself. It is your task to submit yourself to My will at such times, more than at others.” (Diary 1697).
And then Jesus said to Saint Faustina at another time in the Diary of Divine Mercy, “I desire that you know more profoundly the love that burns in My Heart for souls, and you will understand this when you meditate upon My Passion regularly. Call upon My mercy on behalf of sinners; I desire their salvation. When you say this prayer, with a contrite heart and with faith on behalf of some sinner, I will give him or her the grace of conversion. This is the prayer which finishes the Divine Mercy Chaplet: “O Blood and Water, which gushed forth from the Heart of Jesus as a fount of Mercy for us, I trust in You.” (Divine Mercy Diary 186/187). God bless you.
Father Rich Tomkosky is the Pastor of Saint Thomas the Apostle Parish in Bedford and the Pastor of Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish in Beans Cove.
