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About the Congress

THE SECOND WORLD DIVINE MERCY CONGRESS WACOM 2011

Kraków-Łagiewniki – 1-5.10.2011

From 1-5 October 2011, the Second World Apostolic Congress on Divine Mercy (WACOM – World Apostolic Congress on Mercy) will be held in Kraków. This time, the place of the encounter of the worshippers of Divine Mercy from all over the world will be the Sanctuary in Kraków-Łagiewniki, where Saint Sister Faustina Kowalska spent the last years of her life and where today the world center of the devotion of Divine Mercy has found a home.

The first World Apostolic Congress on Mercy was held in Rome on the 2- 6 April 2008; it was organized from the initiative of Cardinal Krzysztof Schönborn and Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz. In the Organizing Committee there were, among others: Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the Vicar of Rome, Cardinal Francis Arinze, President of the Congregation for the Divine Worship and the Discipline of Sacraments, Cardinal Stanisław Ryłko, President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, Cardinal Philip Barbarin from Lyon, Cardinal Audrys Baczkis from Vilnius, Cardinal Peter Erdö from Budapest. The Congress sessions took place in the Basilica of Saint John in Lateran. On the last day of the Congress, on a White Sunday, also known as the Sunday of Mercy, the participants of the congress took part in Holy Mass celebrated by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. At the close of this ceremony, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz invited everyone to take part in the next Congress on Divine Mercy which was to be held in Kraków in the year 2011.

Kraków – the host city of the Second Congress on Divine Mercy – is the historic capital of Poland, and the home city of His Holiness Pope John Paul II; it has been named the Capital of the devotion of Divine Mercy, as it was here that St Sister Faustina Kowalska, the Apostle of the Divine Mercy had lived and operated. In Kraków-Łagiewniki there is a Convent of the Congregation of Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, where on the 5^th of October 1938 Sister Faustina died and was buried in the convent cemetery. In the year 1963, from the initiative of the then Archbishop of Kraków Karol Wojtyła, there began a process of Sister Faustina’s beatification; this process was conducted by the Kraków Archdiocese until Sister Faustina’s beatification in the year 1993 and subsequently her canonization in the Jubilee Year 2000. Sister Faustina’s Diary, in which she described her mystical experiences and her mission to proclaim to the world the message of Divine Mercy, entrusted to her by the Lord Jesus through her spiritual experiences, was kept here in the Kraków convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy.

In his encyclical letter entitled Dives in Misericordia (1980), the Holy Father John Paul II had made the mystery of the Divine Mercy the leading motif of his pastoral teaching. He emphasized that Mercy, understood as God’s attribute, constitutes the key to the understanding of God’s presence in the world which in the course of the XX century had experienced the First and Second World War, the terrible October revolution, Hitler’s Nazism, the genocide of the concentration camps and the communist system which extended to vast areas of our globe. According to John Paul II, mercy also constitutes the key to the understanding of the contemporary man who seems to have lost his way among the various philosophical concepts which are not able to explain to him the sense and purpose of life. In the situation of an ideological confusion, John Paul II pointed to the Divine Mercy as a sign of hope for the entire humankind. In the Divine Mercy, contemporary people can discover the true face of God and the true face of man. Thus, bringing this mystery closer to the contemporary man constitutes one of the Church’s main tasks: “The Church of our time must become more particularly and profoundly conscious of the need to bear witness in her whole mission to God’s mercy, following in the footsteps of the tradition of the Old and the New Covenant, and above all of Jesus Christ Himself and His Apostles. The Church must bear witness to the mercy of God revealed in Christ, in the whole of His mission as Messiah, professing it in the first place as a salvific truth of faith and as necessary for a life in harmony with faith and then seeking to introduce it and to make it incarnate in the lives both of her faithful and as far as possible in the lives of all people of good will (Dives in Misericordia, VII). The Church refers to and implores God’s mercy in the face of all the manifestations of evil, before all the threats that cloud the whole horizon of the life of humanity today.

As the Holy Father John Paul II emphasized in his canonization homily delivered on the 30 April 2000, through the testimony of the life of St Sister Faustina, God entrusted to the humankind the message of the Divine Mercy: “By Divine Providence, the life of this humble daughter of Poland was completely linked with the history of the 20^th century, the century we have just left behind. In fact, it was between the First and Second World Wars that Christ entrusted his message of mercy to her. Those who remember, who were witnesses and participants in the events of those years and the horrible sufferings they caused for millions of people, know very well how necessary was the message of mercy”. Through private revelations, the Lord Jesus communicated to Sister Faustina: “Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy” (Diary, 300). Thanks to this Polish nun the message of Mercy became a gift which brought a special light to our times. The Light of the Divine Mercy allows us to better comprehend the sense of this world and make sense of the changes that are taking place in it; it allows us to perceive the role we Christians have to play in the XXI century, as witnesses of God’s infinite love that lights up the roads of the contemporary times.

The Second World Divine Mercy Congress whose main motto is Mercy as the Source of Hope wishes to bring together the worshippers of the Divine Mercy from all the continents of our globe and to create for them an opportunity to share their experiences of mercy in life and proclaiming it to the world. It will also be a time of interpreting the message of mercy in the context of a “new evangelization” and of looking for new methods of testifying about the God of mercy before the world. The participants of the Congress would also like to express their unity with the Holy Father Benedict XVI and through this unity to become a sign of hope for the whole Church and the world.

The Kraków Archdiocese and WACOM would like to invite everyone most cordially to take part in the Second World Divine Mercy Congress which is going to be held in Kraków next year.

Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz

Metropolitan Archbishop of Kraków

Cardinal Krzysztof Schönborn

Metropolitan Archbishop of Vienna

Kraków, 3.11.2010

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