A few quick thoughts on today’s Solemnity, in the context of this historical moment:
Everything authentic conforms to this paradigm: being made anew after deep brokenness. If spirit truly is the capacity for self-transcendence, then implosion and expansion are part of what it means, for us, to be. The thrice-sinful Peter is the rock on which Christ built the Church. The Paschal feast begins with the triumphal proclamation of truly necessary sin. While nothing necessitates specifically moral failure, the path for all must involve some kind of undoing and reconfiguration.
The Sanctuary of the Divine Mercy in Vilnius exemplifies this pattern. Constructed in the fifteenth century and dedicated originally to the Holy Trinity, the chapel is something of a historical marvel, having endured two fires, a reconsecration as Russian Orthodox under the tsarists, and a complete abandonment enforced by the atheistic Soviet regime. It has been associated at one point with Carmelite monks, and with a renowned priest-astronomer at another. Pope St. John Paul II led the Rosary outside to close the Jubilee Year of the Redemption.
The chapel is associated, above all, with the spiritual legacy of St. Faustina Kowalska. It was on the Second Sunday of Easter that the Kazimirowski painting of the Merciful Christ was first given honor here, set over the main altar. This image is the focal point of a space exceptional for its architecturally realized ethereal tenebrism; like the image itself, the shrine is a master study in light and shadow.
The Gospel for this day relates the struggle of faith experienced by the absent apostle Thomas. He advanced conditions on which he would believe; when these were met, he readily made good on his word. There is no virtue in credulity; Thomas realizes that nothing short of woundedness testifies to the truth. Indeed, he draws a total identity between the risen Christ and the wounds he bears eternally. Years later, Thomas goes on to affirm the testimony of those wounds with his own, in martyrdom.
The poet Paul Claudel imagines the merciful Father as the archetypal blind patriarch, his eyes impaired with weeping, overcome by the reunion with his cherished ones: “It is not by sight that the Father knows his son, but by touch. ‘The Lord looks on the heart’. It is of the heart alone that he demands the secret of our love.” Exactly as Thomas discerned, so has the Father.
An open heart receives the misery of its beloved. Like attracts like, and a broken heart unwittingly holds forth a strong valence to any brokenness that can vex human life.
All too often, tribal dynamics or ideological rigorism encourage us to judge value via affiliation. Would there not be a surer benchmark?—for our contingent though evolving creation, woundedness is an inevitable state. Does one take wounds unto himself on behalf of others, or remain callous, having offloaded the pain onto others? Without recourse to this mystery, we become grievously (and, at a certain point, likely culpably) liable to credulity. Perhaps we should, like Thomas, be emboldened to demand of those in whom we place our trust the evidence of wound-bearing. Will we, like Thomas, carry our witness to the ends of the earth, even unto the shedding of our own blood?—or will we empower the enemies of the Cross to commit veritable murder, drowning out the cries of the afflicted with theopolitical mythologizing glorification of ourselves and our personal cohort? Will we, blinded with weeping, reach out to our neighbor’s wounds – or will we coldly look on the harmed innocents, like the infant girl killed today as bombs fell on the site of her own father’s funeral, and see only “collateral damage”?
On the same night that the Church began keeping the Feast of Divine Mercy, the crowning day of the Easter Octave, that Pope Leo XIV led the world in a Vigil for Peace, that the negotiations in Islamabad to end the Iran War failed, the President of the United States was in Miami, pursuing a Saturday night of entertainment:
“Mr. Trump sat and impassively watched blood and saliva sprayed out from the fighters beating each other silly in front of him.”
Though the gladiatorial arena and the global theater are not identical, a taste for blood sport, on the closing night of the Easter Octave, a night suspended between grace and tragedy, speak to a certain character of the heart, and are a data point not easily dismissed. It weighs on one.
So let us look in hope to words of St. John Paul II, from the encyclical Dives in Misericordia, Rich in Mercy:
In the name of Jesus Christ crucified and risen, in the spirit of His messianic mission, enduring in the history of humanity, we raise our voices and pray that the Love which is in the Father may once again be revealed at this stage of history, and that, through the work of the Son and Holy Spirit, it may be shown to be present in our modern world and to be more powerful than evil: more powerful than sin and death.
Image: By Caravaggio – Self-scanned, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15219522
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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