SAN FRANCISCO — As the Church celebrates Divine Mercy Sunday, the devotion first introduced by St. Faustina Kowalska continues to spread.

The East Coast has had a shrine of Divine Mercy for nearly 50 years. If the Divine Mercy Eucharistic Society of California has its way, the West Coast will have its own.

The Eucharistic Society hopes to establish a new shrine on 100 acres in the San Francisco Bay area as a place of mercy, refuge, renewal and healing. The Eucharistic Society was founded by real estate professional Thelma Orias back in 1990.

Experiencing general dissatisfaction in her life, Orias turned to prayer. A friend encouraged her to attend Eucharistic adoration at Our Lady of Peace in Santa Clara. Orias began attending at 2:30 every morning.

“I didn’t know anything about these kinds of devotions,” said Orias. “I didn’t know how to pray.” Yet, Orias told Christ she wanted to serve him.

In September 1990, she received some audio tapes in the mail from the Association of Marian Helpers in Stockbridge, Mass. Through those, Orias came to learn about the Divine Mercy devotion. Since that time, she’s become an apostle of Divine Mercy, spreading the devotion’s message through conferences, processions, pilgrimages and celebrations in the San Francisco Bay area.

The Divine Mercy devotion traces its roots to Feb. 22, 1931, when Polish Sister Faustina Kowalska saw a vision of Christ and was told to spread the message of Divine Mercy to the whole world. She saw Jesus with rays of light streaming from his heart, and he told her to have an image painted in its likeness with the words “Jesus, I trust in you” placed underneath. The devotion is rooted in the infinite mercy of Christ.

After her vision, Sister Faustina kept a diary, which was later published. The investigation into her cause began in 1965. She was beatified on April 18, 1993, and canonized on April 30, 2000.

The Eucharistic Society hopes to build the West Coast Divine Mercy Shrine on “Mercy Hills” — rolling hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay area in the township of Sunol. The plans call for a large cruciform domed church with perpetual Eucharistic adoration, a home for priests and religious, and a Divine Mercy Retreat and Conference Center.

The group will need to secure $3.1 million to purchase the land. The total estimated cost of the project is $30 million.

Once complete, the shrine would be a “sister shrine” to the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Mass.

Next year, that shrine will celebrate its 50th anniversary. The priests and brothers of the Congregation of Marians of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary have resided on Eden Hill in Stockbridge since June 1944. An image of “The Divine Mercy” was enshrined in one of the small chapels where the congregation’s members prayed daily a perpetual novena to the Divine Mercy. The next spring, pilgrims began arriving to celebrate the feast of the Divine Mercy, and the congregation was asked to build a shrine. Construction on the shrine began in 1950 and was completed and dedicated in 1960. It was declared a national shrine in 1996.

Midwestern Shrine

Midway between the existing shrine in the East and the future shrine in the West is a lesser-known Divine Mercy shrine on the prairies of central Minnesota. St. Paul’s Church in Sauk Centre, Minn., has had a singular devotion to the Divine Mercy since 1982. It bears the distinction of having what the church’s pastor believes to be the oldest hand-carved wooden statue of Divine Mercy in the world. That statue, carved by Lawrence Kaas in 1980, was blessed and dedicated by then Bishop George Speltz of St. Cloud on April 18, 1982.

Kaas, now a deacon, said that the inspiration for the statue originally came from a newspaper called Divine Love. Kaas and three other men began a monthly Divine Mercy group.

“The centerfold of that newspaper had the message of Divine Mercy,” explained Kaas. “We wanted God’s mercy for our community.”

Every year since 1982, the community has celebrated the feast of Divine Mercy — the Sunday following Easter — with a daylong solemn celebration. Following the morning Masses, at noon, there is exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. There is a talk on the theme of Divine Mercy and confessions. At 3 p.m. — the hour of Divine Mercy — there is another talk, followed by the Divine Mercy Chaplet. Mass follows at 4 p.m., after which the Divine Mercy statue is blessed and processed out of church to the St. Faustina Adoration Chapel in a nearby building. The day concludes with a meal in the church basement.

Father Todd Schneider, pastor of St. Paul’s, says that the event has drawn upwards of 300 people, many from long distances.

Sanctuary for Weary Souls

The statue, however, isn’t the parish’s only connection to St. Faustina.

While working on the parish’s pictorial directory, Father Schneider discovered that the day the church’s cornerstone was blessed was April 10, 1904, which was Divine Mercy Sunday that year — before the feast had even been established.

“We like to think that God had a special plan for his Divine Mercy here,” said Father Schneider.

He said that he’s seen many fruits of the devotion. They include his spreading of the devotion as a missionary serving in the diocese’s mission in Maracay, Venezuela; the creation of the parish’s perpetual Eucharistic adoration chapel on Mercy Sunday, April 7, 2002; and people’s return to the sacraments.

Earlier this year, Kaas, who carved the original statue, completed a complementary statue of St. Faustina. That statue was blessed on Feb. 22, 2009, and placed in a niche of the confessional wall.

“It encourages others to come to the base of mercy,” said Father Schneider.

Like the other shrines devoted to the Divine Mercy, Orias hopes that a West Coast shrine would be a place for healing and renewal.

“We need to step out in faith, and we hope that God’s rays of light and mercy will illumine the moral and spiritual darkness that we encounter in our daily lives,” said Orias. “Our hope is to build a sanctuary for weary souls, to expand upon the spiritual and corporal works of mercy that we have begun out of our El Cerrito Center. The vision is to build a literal ‘Mountain of Mercy,’ and to become a place of renewal and refuge.”

Tim Drake is based in

Information
Divine Mercy Eucharistic Society
DivineMercyWestCoast.org
(501) 412-4715
thelmaorias@yahoo.com