STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. — At the Divine Mercy Shrine that stands atop Eden Hill in Stockbridge, Father Thaddeus Lancton is working overtime in the confessional, hearing the confessions of pilgrims. The people coming to the shrine have a sense that they need to embrace God’s love and forgiveness in this Jubilee Year of Mercy — and now more than ever. Because, worldwide, the summer of mercy is drenched in blood.

“People are coming to the shrine almost intuitively,” said the priest, who is a member of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception. Father Lancton told the Register in late July that, last summer, before the Year of Mercy, he said he might have to stay in the confessional two hours at most during the week. But now, they need two or three priests “almost consistently” hearing confessions throughout the week, and then four or five priests in the confessionals on the weekend, to serve the pilgrims flocking to the Massachusetts shrine by the busload.

He has seen people return to the Church after a 40-year absence through confession. Part of the reason is the Year of Mercy, but another part is that the violence and uncertainty inside the country and abroad have told them “something is wrong.”

“They realize they need something more powerful than themselves, not only to get them out of the mess of their own personal lives, but also as a nation and as a world,” Father Lancton said. He explained how pilgrimage itself is a physical acknowledgment that heaven is the Christian’s final destination, and pilgrims must rely on God to make the journey, just as the Israelites had to rely on God to leave the exile of Egypt and reach the Promised Land.

The Divine Mercy Shrine provides pilgrims an oasis of peace, surrounded by flowers and trees, which together renew their experience of God’s “beauty, love and mercy.”

 “People come to the shrine for confession and God’s mercy,” the priest said. “They really seek that out there.”

 

Archbishop Gregory

The summer’s catalogue of violence contains a dire reminder from the Lord for Catholics to renew their commitment to living out the Year of Mercy, according to Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta.

“I think it would be almost foolish for us not to bring these two dynamics together at this very time,” he told the Register in an interview. Besides the violence and racial strife the United States has experienced, he pointed to the brutal wars afflicting the Middle East, the horrific atrocities carried out by cartels and gangs in Central America and unrest boiling over in Latin America and Africa, where Venezuela has run out of food and South Sudan teeters toward renewed civil war. And there was a massacre in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“We live in an increasingly violent world,” the bishop said. “That the violence seems to be a daily occurrence is intensified because it is made present so frequently through social communications. I mean, we just get up in the morning and we almost anticipate, unfortunately, some news of disaster or some acts of brutality.”

The archbishop has been tasked by the U.S. bishops’ conference president, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., to lead a special task force aimed at examining the underlying causes of violence on U.S. streets, including the racial tensions, and developing “best practices” for dioceses to take a leadership role. But key to the endeavor’s success is the faithful turning toward God’s mercy in prayer, which is why the bishops have called on Catholics to join in a “Day of Prayer for Peace in Our Communities” on Sept. 9, the feast of St. Peter Claver, a Jesuit missionary and a fierce defender of human rights in the 17th century.

Celebrating the Year of Mercy amid this numbing violence, Archbishop Gregory added, is a “clarion call” for people to turn from “our foolish arrogance and waywardness” and “focus on God’s mercy toward us.” The image of the Prodigal Son embraced by the loving Father, he said, illustrates for men and women what God’s unconditional love and forgiveness look like for them — no matter what they’ve done — but also that they are called to exercise that same mercy, love and forgiveness toward one another.

“It's almost an act of the Holy Spirit that we are in this Year of Mercy now, when we need mercy so desperately,” he said.

 

Fasting With Urgency

The crises of the summer have seen the Church’s shepherds call upon the faithful to respond to evil and violence with ancient weapons: prayer and fasting.

After Islamic State-inspired militants slaughtered Father Jacques Hamel before the altar of his church in Normandy — an act of violence that may have given France its first martyr of the 21st century and came a fortnight after the Bastille Day terrorist attacks in Nice — the French bishops called on the Church to join them on July 29 in a day of fasting and to fill the churches on Aug. 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to ask God for an end to the violence.

The Diocese of Baton Rouge, La., set aside an entire week of prayer and fasting for peace after the police-related killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., followed by the assassination of five Dallas police officers by an ex-Army veteran. The day the diocese announced the week of prayer and fasting, a former Marine ambushed and killed three Baton Rouge police officers, two white and one black, in another apparent revenge killing.

“The city of Baton Rouge has experienced some hard blows,” Father Thomas Ranzino, the diocese’s vicar general, told the Register in late July, saying that both the killings of Sterling and their police officers “have been difficult and hard to bear.”

The city’s experience with this horrifying violence, he said, highlighted the need for the Year of Mercy. Father Ranzino added that exercising mercy, as taught by Pope Francis, helps restore people in a right relationship, whereas killing and violence come from disordered relationships fueled by a view that “life is not precious.”

Fasting is part of how a person admits powerlessness and a need for God’s grace and mercy, according to Father Ranzino. The experience of hunger helps remind Christians that “we are not the source of all answers” and need to make room for God to speak and show how they need to work for peace and reconciliation.

The Diocese of Baton Rouge, during its week of prayer and fasting, issued guidelines to help people more reflectively enter into the penitential spirit of the fast, recommending that at the end of the fasting week people return to the older practice of fasting three hours before Communion on Sunday Mass as a “real preparation for the Eucharist.”

Now that the week of fasting concluded, Father Ranzino said Bishop Robert Muench has decided to set up a commission to address the underlying causes of racial tension in Louisiana, and the next step at the diocese will involve working with other faith leaders to discuss how they can address these issues in a proactive manner.

“From my seat, the Lord is asking us to make a change of heart and to be very aware that there is evil in the world and that we have to trust a way given to us to deal with that evil without losing hope,” he said. “There’s no question of the outcome. … Death has been defeated, and this is to help us remember that and have hope for living in a world where we see the handiwork of God everywhere.”

 

Recovering a Patrimony of Mercy

Although days of prayer and fasting have not been a regular feature in the religious psyche of most U.S. Catholics of the Latin rite for 50 years, the U.S. Latin-rite bishops have started to take a page from their Eastern Catholic counterparts and actively urge their Catholic flocks to take up freely the Latin Church’s patrimony of penance.

Although Eastern-rite Catholics are expected to observe set days of fasting throughout the liturgical year, most Latin Catholics have no expectation that Friday fasts, vigil fasts and the four seasonal fasts known as the “Ember days,” should form part of their lived Catholic identity. However, the personal ordinariates for the Anglican patrimony have encouraged Catholics to integrate many of the traditional fasts of the Latin Church to complement the mandatory observance of the Ash Wednesday and Good Friday fasts, as well as abstinence from meat during Fridays in Lent.

Starting in the Year of Faith (2012-2013), the U.S. Catholic bishops encouraged Catholics to return to the traditional year-round Friday fast and abstinence for the Church’s intentions, particularly regarding life, the family and religious liberty.

As more crises have unfolded, such as the adoption of assisted suicide in California, calls to observe dedicated weeks of prayer and fasting have emerged more and more. 

Father Richard Heilman, a Wisconsin-based priest, is spearheading a spiritual initiative for Catholics to pray for the spiritual healing of the country with the “Novena for Our Nation.” This “54-Day Rosary Novena” begins on Aug. 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption, and concludes on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on Oct. 7.

In the little time he has to preach to pilgrims at the Divine Mercy Shrine, Father Lancton seeks to remind the faithful that God’s mercy must be shared. His message is that “every little thing matters” in the divine economy — sin contributes to the violence in the world, but every little bit of mercy helps to heal and build up the health of the Body of Christ. He pointed to St. Faustina, who, though a poorly educated nun, became the saint God called her to be, spreading his Divine Mercy message farther than she could have ever imagined.

“What we need are more Christians formed by God’s love,” he said. “Jesus promised us we will not find peace unless there is mercy.”

Peter Jesserer Smith is a Register staff reporter.