I'll be going to World Youth Day in Poland this July along with a group sponsored by the Salesian Eastern Province. Here's something I wrote with Fr. Dominic Tran, SDB for the WYD Salesian Facebook page.
World Youth Day 2016 and the Extraordinary Jubilee that goes until November 20 share a common focus: the Mercy of God. This convergence of themes is no coincidence and these great themes came together as the result of the work of the giant figures, the shepherds the Good Shepherds has given to the Church in recent years—Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.
St. John Paul was the great promoter of the Divine Mercy devotion and the cause of St. Faustina. He said, early on in his pontificate, "Right from the beginning of my ministry in St. Peter’s See in Rome, I consider this message [of Divine Mercy] my special task. Providence has assigned it to me in the present situation of man, the Church and the world. It could be said that precisely this situation assigned that message to me as my task before God." He beatified and Canonized St. Faustina and established the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday. He saw mercy as the remedy for humanity after all the wars and atrocities of the 20th century: it was now the time to return to God and seek forgiveness and to turn to one another in a spirit of reconciliation and mercy.
Pope Benedict XVI, being a great theologian, gave us the theology of God’s mercy. With his very first encyclical, he emphasized, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny. In the same verse, Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us”.
In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant. For this reason, I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others. (Deus Caritas Est, #1)
Pope Francis also has stressed mercy from the beginning of his time as the Vicar of Christ. Just a few days after his election in 2013 he said, “God's mercy can make even the driest land become a garden, can restore life to dry bones ... Let us be renewed by God's mercy, let us be loved by Jesus, let us enable the power of his love to transform our lives too; and let us become agents of this mercy, channels through which God can water the earth, protect all creation and make justice and peace flourish.” He has never ceased to call us to be a Church of mercy, both seeking out God’s forgiveness and living mercy in our lives. He has both promoted the Divine Mercy chaplet as a “powerful medicine” but also called us to go out and live mercy in our lives.
In this way St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis can be called the Popes of Mercy. As it is said, JP II introduced the what - Divine Mercy, Benedict taught us why, and Francis shows us how.
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