St. Michael's Parish

Wednesday Apr 1, 2020

• Family Assembly Night CANCELLED

  Wednesday Apr 1, 2020 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM

Sunday Apr 5, 2020

• Palm Sunday

  Sunday Apr 5, 2020 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM

  Watch this Mass on HMU channel 15 at 4:00pm Sunday or Wednesday. Mediacom channel 18 at 4:00pm Monday. FMCTC channel 48 at 4:00pm Sunday. You can also see it anytime on the Knights YouTube channel: https://tinyurl.com/y4ax6z3g

Sunday Apr 12, 2020

• Easter Mass of the Resurrection

  Sunday Apr 12, 2020 All day

  Watch this Mass on HMU channel 15 at 4:00pm Sunday or Wednesday. Mediacom channel 18 at 4:00pm Monday. FMCTC channel 48 at 4:00pm Sunday. You can also see it anytime on the Knights YouTube channel: https://tinyurl.com/y4ax6z3g

Sunday Apr 19, 2020

• Divine Mercy Sunday

  Sunday Apr 19, 2020 All day

  The world was in the midst of the Great Depression in 1931 and the
  memories of World War I were still very much alive in the minds of
  Europeans when in Poland a sister of the Congregation of Sisters of Our Lady
  of Mercy, Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), is said to have been personally
  visited by Jesus.
  According to her diary, which was listed on the Index of Forbidden Books for
  more than 20 years, an image was revealed to her of the risen Lord, from
  whose heart shone two rays, one red (representing blood) and the other “pale”
  (symbolizing water), with the words “Jesus, I trust in you” at the bottom.
  Faustina wrote in her diary that Jesus told her, “I promise that the soul that
  will venerate this image will not perish.”
  When she was canonized in 2000 under the direction of fellow countryman
  Pope John Paul II, he proclaimed that the Second Sunday of Easter would
  henceforth be known as Divine Mercy Sunday, thereby widely promoting the
  devotional practices associated with Faustina’s visions, already popular in
  many communities.
  St. Faustina, a poorly educated daughter of a humble Polish family, kept a
  600-page diary of the apparitions she claimed continued for years. Her entries
  focus on God’s mercy, the call to accept God’s mercy and to be merciful, the
  need for conversion, and the call to trust in Jesus. It had been Jesus’ own
  wish, she wrote, to establish a feast day: “I [Jesus] desire that the Feast of
  Mercy be a refuge and shelter for all souls. . . . I am giving them the last hope
  of salvation; that is, the Feast of My Mercy.”
  Among the practices associated with the devotion are its novena, the Chaplet
  of the Divine Mercy (a series of prayers organized similarly to a rosary), the
  Hour of Great Mercy (a time of prayer traditionally celebrated at 3 p.m.), and
  the plenary indulgence granted to those who receive the Eucharist and
  celebrate reconciliation on Divine Mercy Sunday.
  But the road to the universal recognition and institutionalization of the
  devotion was anything but smooth. Since Sister Faustina’s diary, which she
  claimed Jesus himself had asked her to keep, had been previously listed on
  the Index of Forbidden Books, it curtailed the exercise of the devotional
  practices. Detractors claimed that her writing contained theological errors,
  while her defenders attribute mistakes to a faulty translation from Polish to
  Italian. While the diary is no longer on the Index and her canonization has
  officially put away concerns regarding the orthodoxy of her writings, critics
  remain.
  The celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday is an opportunity to reflect on the
  theme of how God’s mercy can overcome sin and, as the Congregation for
  Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments states, “a perennial
  invitation to the Christian world to face, with confidence in divine
  benevolence, the difficulties and trials that mankind [sic] will experience in
  the years to come.”
  This article appeared in the May 2011 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 76, No. 5 pg. 46)