(LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic priest is encouraging the faithful to go to confession this week and receive Holy Communion on Divine Mercy Sunday, for anyone who does so will obtain an incredible grace: the remission of temporal punishment due to sin.
Father Chris Alar, a Marian priest and expert on the Divine Mercy devotion, joined me on today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show to discuss the devotion and its continued relevance to Catholics today.
As St. Faustina Kowalska mentioned in her diary, Our Lord marked the first Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday, a day specifically for the “floodgates of mercy” to be wide open. Hence any believer who confesses his or her sins and then receives Holy Communion on Divine Mercy Sunday will not only obtain complete forgiveness of sin, but the remission of the temporal punishment, said Father Alar.
“Those two stains stain our wedding garment: sin and the punishment [for sin]. Now on Divine Mercy Sunday, eighth day, symbolic of eternity, Christ wipes them all away,” he said. “He takes away all the sin and all the punishment, so that our wedding garment, our soul, is spotless for Him to take to Heaven. And that is the nuptial meaning of the Mass on earth, and it’s a foretaste of what the union will be in Heaven.”
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Father Alar also explained how Our Lord appears to have given St. Faustina the Divine Mercy Chaplet as a prayer specifically against abortion.
“In the diary St. Faustina … does talk about the pains that she incurred in the womb,” he said. “She said it was the most excruciating pain that she had ever encountered in her entire life. And she specifically wrote that they were between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m. there in Poland. Now, ironically, Poland at the time was one of the leading centers of abortion in all of Europe, and the city, specifically, of Warsaw. And St. Faustina wrote about her pains that you would feel very much descriptive of like an abortion.”
St. Faustina prophesied that Our Lord would allow Warsaw to be destroyed, which happened when the Germans invaded Poland at the beginning of the Second World War, but not before she had a vision of an “angel ready to strike” and prayed the words of what is now the Divine Mercy Chaplet.
The subtext, Father Alar explained, is that one should pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet “for all intentions, but especially that of abortion.”
For much more from Father Chris Alar, tune in to today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show.
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