| The Divine Mercy
Charles Whitehead recalls a visit to Auschwitz and the insight he gained into God's mercy
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As we entered the tranquillity and peace of the beautifully simple new basilica at the Sanctuary, there was an overwhelming sense of peace and forgiveness of God. We were reminded of the vision of Sr. Faustina (now of course St. Faustina) and the history of the Sanctuary. As I listened I began to see that when Jesus spoke to an uneducated 26 year old nun in a convent in 1931, revealing to her the depths of his mercy, he was in fact preparing a place to which people would later be able to come to experience his forgiveness - and this just a few short miles from places which were to be the setting for acts of mankind's most appalling depravity and inhumanity. Over the years people had often spoken to me about the Divine Mercy, and told me how Jesus appeared to Sr. Faustina wearing a white robe with two rays, one white and one red, fl owing from his breast. He had told her to make a painting of his image, and that the whole Church should celebrate the first Sunday after Easter as the Feast of Mercy. I must admit that I usually responded like many of those to whom Faustina recounted her vision, and expressed only lukewarm interest. I am not a person who immediately responds enthusiastically to devotions of this sort, preferring to concentrate on the Scriptures and the Lord's presence in the Eucharist - after all, I know perfectly well that God is merciful to us. But after my visit to Auschwitz I began to see something of what Faustina's spiritual director Fr. Sopocko, and later Pope John Paul II, must have seen immediately - the enormous importance for all of us in this clear message of the Divine Mercy. It means not only receiving God's amazing mercy, but also giving it to others. "Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy" (Matthew 5:7). In the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy, our groups from the conference were able to ask forgiveness for the sins of our human race, to experience the grace and mercy of God, to forgive those who had hurt us, to celebrate in the Eucharist the reality that Jesus gave his life to take away all our sins and to reconcile us to the Father, and to realise that in his mercy God had prepared this place for us and hundreds of thousands like us. It was here that the daughter of a Nazi officer asked and received forgiveness from a Polish Bishop whose mother and sister had died in one of the concentration camps, and I watched as they wept together, united in their understanding of God's love and mercy in the midst of a confusing world. This day of pilgrimage is etched on my memory, but it's not a negative memory - quite the opposite. I realised again that the grace and forgiveness God has for all of us has no limits. Each of us is precious to him, a fact so clearly demonstrated when he sent his Son to die so that we might live. It was demonstrated again at the Basilica of Divine Mercy, where I was able to meet this God of love, and receive his forgiveness and mercy again after the turmoil of a visit to Auschwitz. I left the Basilica knowing that the mercy of the Lord rests upon me, and that I am called to reflect it to others.
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The
image of the Christian life as a journey of faith has always been
very real for me, probably because over the years I've travelled a
lot in this country and abroad. One of the most powerful experiences
I had last year was at a European conference of Catholic leaders.
The conference was held in Czestochowa in Poland, and was attended
by over 600 leaders from 23 European countries. The daily themes of
the 6 day gathering were taken from the Pope's encyclical "Novo
Millennio Ineunte", and there was a full programme of talks and
seminars. During the planning of the conference, the Polish organisers
had proposed that one day out of the six might be a day of pilgrimage,
and they suggested visiting Auschwitz Birkenau and the Sanctuary of
God's Mercy near Krakow. I was not sure how well this would work with
a group from 23 different countries with all their various languages
and national characteristics, but I had always wanted to go to Auschwitz,
so I went along with their proposal and the pilgrimage was included
in the conference programme. 
It
was a damp, grey day when we set off in our coaches for Auschwitz
Birkenau, and as we approached the camp and saw the high wire fences
and the forbidding buildings it began to drizzle with rain. As we
entered the camp through the main gates I was struck by the irony
of the words forged in metal above the gates "Arbeit Macht Frei"
(work makes freedom). Through these gates tens of thousands of the
inmates had marched daily, ten abreast, to their work assignments,
and back exhausted in the evening. Few survived more than a few months.
As we toured the camp in language groups with our guides, we saw the
appalling living conditions with two in a bunk-bed, the punishment
blocks, the wall against which thousands had been shot, the incinerators,
the railhead where tens of thousands of Jews and gypsies from all
over occupied Europe arrived, were stripped of their clothes and possessions,
and marched into the "decontaminating showers" of the gas
chambers. I find it almost impossible to put into words the impact
of these unspeakable horrors. How could this have happened? How could
man do this to his fellow man? I began to wonder how we were going
to deal with the impact of all this on our group, which included Germans
and Austrians, Poles and Dutch. From Auschwitz Birkenau we travelled
in silent coaches the few miles to Krakow, to the Sanctuary of God's
Mercy, and I began to see what our Polish organisers had in mind when
they put together these two contrasting places of pilgrimage.
