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Brilliant, 6th May 2019

Reviewer: Brían Foy

Extremely relevant and relatable, every reading hits home.

As appeared in Intercom, May 2019, 29th Apr 2019

Reviewer: The Editor, Intercom, May 2019

In Evangelii Gaudium (126), Pope Francis writes: ‘Expressions of popular piety have much to teach us; for those who are capable of reading them they are a locus theologicus which demands our attention, especially at a time when we are looking to the new evangelisation.’
It’s fair to say that the devotion to the Divine Mercy, based on the life and writings of St Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), has become a staple of popular piety in our day. Countless believers have been enriched by the insights, simplicity and courage of a young Polish nun, who struggled to enter religious life, then lived her vocation in obscurity and illness, before dying at the age of thirty-three.
In this small volume, Fr Éamonn P. Bourke shows that this particular strand of popular piety has theological weight and substance. He does this in thirty short chapters, each of which has a threefold format. First, there is a brief excerpt from the diary of St Faustina, which is followed by a reflection, which in turn leads into a concluding section entitled, ‘For your prayer.’
This has been my first contact with the writings of St Faustina, and I have been struck by the simplicity and accuracy of her insights. Who needs ‘mindfulness,’ when one of our own saints can tell us, with candour: ‘For the Spirit of God to act in the soul, peace and recollection are needed’? Or again, in our screen-saturated environment, we could listen to Faustina describing how she overcame the distraction of the radio playing, each afternoon, in her convent: ‘Yet nothing disturbs me now, neither the talking nor the radio…’
To the saint’s rock-solid simplicity, Fr Bourke brings the sensitivity of the spiritual director (a role he has occupied on both sides of the Atlantic, as a director in the Ignatian contemplative vein). His reflections are down-to-earth, and his suggestions for prayer invite us to attend to the movement of spirits within us. How are you feeling right now? What experiences of your life are causing

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