...and a gathering in London...

... or, rather, beneath London, in the crypt of St Patrick's Church in Soho, to view a new film about the original Divine Mercy painting.

St Faustina had the visions of Christ while at a convent in what is today Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania,  once part of Poland.  The message from Christ was to paint a picture, a very specific image about mercy, with rays of light streaming out from His heart...

With no personal talent or training in art, Faustina was helped by her confessor who found a painter who produced, under  the nun's daily and detailed directions, a powerful image. Christ is seen in a white, simple but vaguely liturgical, robe, against a dark background, his eyes  lowered and serious, one hand gently indicating his breast from where bright white and red light flows. It is subtly different in lots of ways from all the subsequent Divine Mercy images. One significant change is that his right hand, raised in blessing, is held at shoulder-level: apparently this was the liturgical rule at the time, and it is a different style from the larger generous sweeping gesture shown in the popularised images.

As the film explains, the events of World War II and its aftermath meant a complicated series of journeys for this picture - hidden in an atttic, displayed for years in a remote country church,...meanwhile devotion to the Divine Mercy swept Poland and a number of other paintings were commissioned by various people, but none were strictly accurate.

After the fall of Communism, the whole full story was pieced together: the original picture is now at the shrine in Vilnius.

I detected a faint Poland/Lithuania tension as the tale unfolded, though this was not mentioned by the (American) narrator or any of the other people and may not really have occurred...on reflection I think it was all just part of the tragedy of those years of the 1930,40s,and 50s and on through the 70s. The film features interviews with Lithuanian bishops, priests, a nun, historians, an art expert..., some speaking in English, others with sub-titles, who tell the whole story rather well and explain the background to each complicated chapter of the picture's history.  Then as the discussion widens to include the whole Divine Mercy story, there are a  number of  well-known Catholic commentators (Cardinal Schonborn, Fr Leo Masburg, George Weigel): it is a fine and most interesting piece of work, well researched.

It was odd to hear Lithuaniians talking, in a grim but everyday way, about people arrested and sent  to Siberia for years in prison-camps. For them, it is a normal thing to discuss. In a ghastly and somehow drab, ordinary sort of way, life in a Soviet-dominated land suddenly became real, instead of something dramatic about  Iron Curtain Prisoners.

After the film, we went outside, to gather in a side-street by the church's Mercy Door. Fr Alexander led us in prayer, and as we trooped inside, singing a hymn, I glimpsed the faces of two workmen standing nearby, who were singularly unimpressed.   We must have looked rather ridiculous, and I suddenly realised that's how so many religious events and processions must appear...

Then prayer before the Blessed sacrament, and confessions, and the Divine Mercy unfolding....