The Divine Mercy Chaplet

The Chaplet of Divine Mercy comes from the revelations given to a humble Polish nun, St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. In 1935 she recorded that Our Lord taught her this chaplet, to be prayed on ordinary Rosary beads, as a prayer to obtain mercy for sinners and for the whole world. It belongs to the wider Divine Mercy devotion — the image of Christ with red and pale rays streaming from His Heart, and beneath it the words "Jesus, I trust in You."

The chaplet is a prayer of offering and reparation. On the large beads the soul does something bold: it offers to the Eternal Father "the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity" of His Son — that is, it pleads the whole sacrifice of Christ, the same offering made on the altar at every Mass, "in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world." On the small beads it begs, "for the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy." It appeals not to our merits but to the infinite price already paid on Calvary.

The devotion was examined and approved by the Church, and in the Jubilee Year 2000 Pope St. John Paul II canonized Sister Faustina — the first saint declared in the new millennium — and established Divine Mercy Sunday on the octave day of Easter. The faithful are especially urged to pray the chaplet at three o’clock in the afternoon, the "Hour of Great Mercy," when Our Lord died upon the Cross. The chaplet concludes with the ancient Trisagion, "Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One" — joining a twentieth-century gift to one of the oldest cries of Christian worship.