I found this on one of the links Matthew gave..
Fr. Perez - Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
June 27, 2010
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen
Well, my dear faithful, today I just wanted to say a couple of words about something -- I get a lot of questions about this every year and I did not have the proper source materials to answer this at the time of year it usually comes up. But the latest copy of The Angelus Magazine had some answers I needed. So I
decided to say a few words.
This concerns what we call the Divine Mercy Devotion. And it kind of came out of the blue from John Paul II. And every year on the Sunday following Easter, which we call Low Sunday, in Latin they call it Sunday in White, Dominica in Albis, I have questions asked me, Father, why don’t we don’t we do Divine Mercy
Sunday. Now, the easy answer was, We don’t do it because it’s not in the traditional calendar. And that could be right. But, then again, the feast of Padre Pio isn’t in the traditional calendar and we do recently canonized saints using the Common from the Missile, so why not Divine Mercy Sunday. And I would like to
say just a few words about that because it shows the type of things we have to be aware of, I guess, as Catholics trying to slug it out and achieve our salvation the best way we can when we keep on having novelties thrown at us daily. I have looked at the Divine Mercy devotion, just the devotion itself, as have
many people here, and found nothing wrong with the devotion itself, the prayers of the devotion. And there is nothing wrong with the prayers themselves of the devotion. That’s why I wanted to say a few words about it, because there is something wrong with what surrounds this new devotion.
Now, I might also add first off that there are people, possibly even people here who have received graces from doing the Divine Mercy devotion. That is not an indication that the devotion itself is necessarily from heaven. Please remember that God will answer your prayers. And you may not get the same level of grace as you would if something were perhaps from heaven with particular promises attached. For example, the revelation, small “r”, private revelation but still from God of the First Saturdays or the First Fridays and the
graces that Our Lord and Our Lady will promise you from those. Okay, that’s one thing because those are from heaven and you do get those. But you always get some grace by your prayers. You know, if you wanted to make a pilgrimage to visit the burial place of some saint and you went on this pilgrimage and, instead of, you thought you were in the right cemetery and you were kneeling by, you know, St. Philomena or whatever -- she’s not in a cemetery, she’s in a church, but let’s say just for example -- and instead you were kneeling beside the grave of like Chef Boyardee or something like that, and it wasn’t St. Philomena at
all. God would still give you graces with a good heart and willing to please Him and make reparation for your sins. You made this pilgrimage, you will not go without grace. It’s not like, Well, you’re at the wrong grave.
Sorry, you know, you went 6,000 miles for nothing and now you get nothing. No, God will always answer your prayers. So please remember when you hear people say, Well, I have gotten graces from this devotion, that it in itself is not an indication that the devotion is from heaven. Certainly the graces are always
from heaven.
Now what then is wrong with the Divine Mercy devotion? Now this research, thankfully, comes from Fr. Scott, Fr. Peter Scott, who was once District Superior here, and he gave me -- it’s nearly impossible without
plowing through the Vatican Library to find source material on this. So I’m not exactly plagiarizing, but he did provide me most of what I needed for this, so Berettas off to Fr. Scott.
What is wrong with this. First of all, Pius XII even, when this first came to his attention, and what came to his attention was not the prayers of the devotion as they came to be later on, but the circuмstances of the socalled
apparitions to Sr. Faustina and the content of the supposed apparitions,
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that is, what Our Lord supposedly told Sr. Faustina and what he told her to repeat. Under Pius XII, then, this devotion, the apparitions, the writings of Sr. Faustina, were placed on the index of prohibited books. This no longer exists. On the one hand, it is unfortunate that it no longer exists. But on the other hand, it would fill this room even if it were on microfiche. Everything practically that is written in this day and age has something objectionable to the Catholic faith. So it is not possible any more to have an index of forbidden books. I have a copy of an old one and, you know, it’s only about that thick (Father demonstrating size of
book), stuff that you shouldn’t read, but it’s impossible now.
Anyway, back in the time of Pius XII, he put this on the index of prohibited books. What that meant was there was content in it that would be objectionable to Catholics and lead them astray, lead them in the
wrong direction for one or more reasons. So it was an interesting beginning.
Now, next, come along Pope John XXIII and twice under him the Holy Office, now the Holy Office -- that’s what that building out there is going to be, as a matter of fact, the holy office, when I finally get situated --
but the Holy Office is another name for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Cardinal Ratzinger headed just before he became Pope Benedict XVI. It was also called the Holy Office of the Inquisition at one time. It’s name has changed over several years. It is the Office directly under the Pope
responsible for maintaining the purity of the doctrine, the dissemination of different docuмents or whatever.
If the Pope wants to set people straight on a particular thing, he usually goes through the Holy Office. So proclamations, declarations, docuмents issuing from the Holy Office may be seen as coming from the Pope
himself, coming from the Holy See. So John XXIII, you know, I know how traditional Catholics usually feel about John XXIII because on the one hand he did good things, he did condemn error in the church, on the
other hand, he started the whole Vatican II ball rolling. So it may be a bit incredible, but twice under Pope John XXIII, this particular devotion was condemned through the Holy Office. The first was on November 19,
1958. And the declaration from the Holy Office declares three particular things about this devotion. That there is no evidence of the supernatural origin of these supposed revelations, meaning they looked at the content and they said, There is nothing here to indicate that this is supernatural. And normally there is in a
real apparition. In a real apparition, Our Lady of Lourdes, for example, Our Lady of Fatima, whatever, you can look at the content and say it’s not proof. The first analysis is not proof. But there is stuff here that could possibly be of divine origin. On the other hand, in the Divine Mercy, they said there is no evidence
whatsoever, meaning, translation, We don’t think and we’re pretty sure this does not come from God.
They furthermore declared that there shall not be a feast of Divine Mercy instituted. No feast of Divine Mercy is to be instituted. Why? Because if it is based on something that there is no proof comes from God, then you are being rash and temerarious by instituting a feast, of all things, in the church, based on
something that is a false apparition. And thirdly, it is forbidden to publish the images and writings that propagate this devotion under the form received by Sr. Faustina. So it was furthermore forbidden to even publish the image, the so-called image of Our Lord and Divine Mercy. Now this, by the way, image you have all seen, even if in passing and you would know it and recognize it. It shows kind of a -- I don’t know -- the picture of Jesus makes me uneasy. I can’t really tell you why. I don’t like it. I don’t like the face, I don’t like the gesture, I don’t like the posture, I don’t like anything -- that’s the first thing that struck me about this
image is even as an image of Our Lord, I don’t want it around because it’s kind of, for lack of a better term, creepy to me when I look at it. But second of all, it shows these rays, kind of multicolored rays, I think it’s like red, white and blue, or maybe it’s just red and blue or something like that, coming out of His chest area,
no heart, just these rays. And you’ve all seen this. Okay, so it was forbidden to publish those images.
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Nextly, March 6, 1959, they made another proclamation, Pope John XXIII had them do it again, and said that it was forbidden, he reiterated that it was forbidden to diffuse images and the writings of Sr. Faustina, and the images of this apparition, the Divine Mercy, and that it was up to the bishops to decide how they
were going to get rid of images that had already been put up. Okay. Now, these are -- I don’t need to say much more about these. Two Popes felt strongly enough about this to bother, one putting it on the Index, the other issuing two proclamations through the Holy Office as to the spiritual danger to the faithful of having this thing promulgated. Not much more needs to be said on that.
Now what is wrong with the devotion and the image. What about the content? Now, of this, because there is very little in the proclamations of what exactly -- some of this is extrapolation from things that were said and
also from the theology of the apparition itself. But first of all, consider the true image of Christ our Savior.
Probably the most symbolically rich and accurate representation of Him besides the crucifix which, you know, there are many images that are appropriate and accurate. The other one, though, would be the
image of the Sacred Heart, because the image of Our Lord and the Sacred Heart has in it all the theology of redemption. You have Our Lord, they pierced His hands, His feet and His Sacred Heart pierced for us, so
there was a price for our redemption. The crown of thorns circling the Heart, but yet burning with love for man which is why He made this sacrifice. It was His burning love for us in spite that we are ungrateful
creatures who rebelled on our Creator. Think about it. He created us and then we nailed Him to a cross and He was God and completely innocent of anything. So the Sacred Heart encapsulates all of that. He is
pointing to this symbolic font of love and mercy for us. The devotions to the Sacred Heart are repeatedly about reparation for our sins. We are sinners, we must do reparation. Yes, we have promises from Our
Lord, but he paid this price, we must do reparation. We should always be doing penance for our sins and various kinds of reparation.
The Divine Mercy is the Sacred Heart without the heart. You notice in the image there is no heart. There are simply rays coming out of nothing, and that encapsulates what is wrong with Divine Mercy. It is Mercy with
no price whatsoever, with no obligations whatsoever, and that is not the message of Christ. Christ is merciful, but His mercy is for the living. His mercy is in pardoning us one time after another, our repeated
sins in the sacrament of penance, yet always taking us back no matter how bad our sins are. What happens in the sacrament of penance? Well, penance. Not only are you there at the sacrament recognizing your
utter submission to the church and your dependence on the sacraments for your very forgiveness, but you walk out of there with an imposed penance, and many times from this pulpit you are reminded that
whatever, decade of the rosary, a rosary you get, or three rosaries even -- not very often -- three rosaries
sometimes, but that you must continually to do penance, your own penance. You don’t just do a decade of the rosary and forget about it the rest of the week and say, Well, I’ve done my penance now. I can go merrily on my way. We live a spirit of penance. So this is at the core what is wrong with Divine Mercy. It is promises of lots of things with no requirement for penance, no mention of reparation, no mention of any of this. This jives very well with Pope John Paul II encyclical Dives in Misericordia, which I do not recommend
that any but the most resistant of you read, because it is full of a lot of kind of misleading things. And the first is a re-echoing of this mercy with no price, gifts from heaven with no requirements, God’s mercy with no
mention of penance or reparation for sin whatsoever. Not surprising, then, that Pope John Paul II, in spite of this and other things I will mention in just a second, instantly, his very first year of his election to the papacy
which was 1978, he set in motion the canonization of Sr. Faustina and founding a Divine Mercy Sunday feast that was prohibited and the very idea suppressed by previous Popes.
So, anyway, the first is, then, that it’s this mercy for nothing kind of thing. Here, you get all this and you give nothing back for your sins. There is, in fact, no recognition for sins. The other is from the
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writings of Sr. Faustina herself. Once again, a lot of reading that was published finally in 2007 in English.
She was Polish, of course, and it is 640 pages long. And in it is this thread of statements supposedly from
Our Lord and from Sr. Faustina that would make a correct thinking Catholic very uneasy, to say the least.
For example, I’ll just take a couple of quotes from her writings. Supposedly, on October 2, 1936, Our Lord
appeared to her and said, Now I know that it is not for the graces or gifts that you love Me, but because My
Will is dearer to you than life. That is why I am uniting Myself with you so intimately as with no other
creature. Now, what is wrong with that? What is wrong with that is, Do you expect us to believe that He has
united Himself more intimately with Sr. Faustina than with the Blessed Virgin Mary? You see, at first it’s not
obvious to most people. That’s why you hire me to tell you things like this. Right? Because at first you would
read that and you’d go, Oh, that’s beautiful. Right? And maybe later it would hit you that, Wait a minute,
more intimately with Sr. Faustina than with any other creature. Our Lady was the Immaculate Conception
but she was a creature of His, she was created by Him and made from dust, from nothing, as the rest of us
were, albeit with the greatest exalted position free from original sin from the very beginning. I’m not
discounting that. But she is likewise a creature and so He is telling supposedly Sr. Faustina this. And that
smacks of pride. Now maybe Sr. Faustina didn’t think about it, maybe it was a false apparition and she was
repeating what she heard from this whatever was appearing to her. In any case, it does smack of pride.
There is also presumption in many cases. For example, Our Lord is supposed to have said to her in 1937,
Beloved pearl of My Heart. Now, what else bothers me about this is that is just saccharin. You know, look
how Our Lady speaks to Sr. Lucia or to St. Bernadette. It’s not, beloved pearl of my heart. That’s gross. You
can’t really see Our Lord stooping to saccharin. Our Lord is Christ the King, Creator of the universe, and
ruler of all that is. He doesn’t go, beloved pearl of my heart. Okay, that’s just one thing.
He says, I see your love so pure. Oh, please. I can’t even read this. Purer than that of the angels. Now, we
are not, except for the Blessed Virgin Mary being free, but because the rest of us aren’t free from original
sin, the rest of us are not capable of love purer than the angels, first of all. And He goes, all the more
because you keep hiding ….for your sake, I bless the world. Okay. Now, for your sake I bless the world.
That might be fine. If we had one real saint in the world, then the Lord will give us blessings because of
even one real saint in the world. That’s not the objection. The objection is, it was 1937, we were on the
verge of World War II, which had already been mentioned to Sr. Lucy at Fatima. You know, if Russia is not
consecrated, and then they don’t convert, then this big disaster will befall mankind for their evil ways and
their sins. Now, we were just about to do that, yet He is saying, for your sake, I am going to bless the world.
Was that a blessing on the world? And her native Poland was not unnoticed by der feuer, so it doesn’t seem
likely.
Okay, there are two other things. I’m sorry, but you have to laugh sometimes, it’s so (inaudible). Sr.
Faustina claimed that Our Lord told her that she was exempt from judgment, every judgment, particular
judgment and the general judgment. Now, nobody but the Blessed Virgin, as far as I know, is free from
general and particular judgment. St. Thomas Aquinas, the pious little story is, had to genuflect in purgatory
before going to heaven. Okay. Maybe it’s just an allegory or something to edify us a little bit, that sort of
thing, but, still, nobody is exempt from any kind of judgment. And add to this, as Fr. Scott put it in his
Australian way, of course. He’d have to say with his accent -- the preposterous affirmation that the host
three times over jumped out of the tabernacle and placed itself in her hands so that she had to open up the
tabernacle and place it back in there. Now it makes it sound like a hamster that has gotten out of its cage.
Oh, no, here it is again. I have to go put this back
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now. But think about it, how many times has the church declared that the hands of a priest are consecrated
to handle the blessed species, and what kind of lesson would you be giving to the world by this example of
the host leaping into her hands so that she had to place it herself back in the tabernacle.
Our Lord does not contradict his Church by word or by gesture. And this would be a little bit by both. She
told what happened, but the gesture of it would be Our Lord contradicting the real presence itself and
everything that that includes.
Anyway, as far as just wrapping it all up, the whole Divine Mercy devotion does not represent a Catholic
spirit. The Catholic spirit is one of constant reparation in penance for our sins, for praying for the graces of
God, for the mercy of God in this life, and things you know well. Now, as I said, Pope John Paul II, then
immediately contradicted this, instituted a feast of Divine Mercy, and I have to finish up by saying, please be
aware it is not the content of this devotion that there is anything wrong with. I think you can really see what I
am talking about. It is because of the background. You don’t justify something with a particular devotion
and, for heaven’s sake, it’s own feast day, whose content and past, the context was condemned and
condemned for very good reason. So, when you look at the Divine Mercy devotions, they are perfectly
orthodox. There is nothing in there that is heretical or presumptuous, or really in the prayers themselves.
But just remember the reason why it has been condemned and that we do not recognize Divine Mercy
Sunday is because of its’ past, not because of the content of the prayers. And I know I’ll have to say this
next year around the Sunday after Easter, but I didn’t have the information this year. But it is very important
to know this, that many things that have been done and resurrected in modern times were condemned in
the past. And it’s not a case of the church changing its’ mind. It’s a case of the church doing something it
shouldn’t be doing.
One more thing, I read just yesterday, even Pope Paul VI, Archbishop Bernini wanted Pope Paul VI to
change the rosary and he refused. And he said this would be incalculably disastrous for the faithful, the
notion that the Pope had altered the rosary. And once again, what did Pope John Paul II do? He added
these preposterous nonsense luminous mysteries. They make no sense whatsoever. Previous Popes have
noted the organic way that the mysteries flow from the very annunciation of Our Lord’s birth to Our Lady, to
her crowning in heaven, the kind of the end of the salvation cycle, as it were, one event after the other. The
luminous mysteries reflect none of that, and even Paul VI condemned changing the rosary. Why he didn’t
follow his own purposes and his own ideas and not change anything else, we don’t know. But Our Lady at
least stopped him there.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen