Chapter 8
Bread from Heaven
That We Not Collapse

In the Holy Eucharist, there is a truth that does not deceive. Satan may seduce us, friends may betray us, parents may abandon us, and priests may disappoint us.

The government may use us, the media may manipulate us, many who come in the name of Jesus may only confuse us, but Jesus in the Holy Eucharist can only love us. His purifying love in the Blessed Sacrament removes the masks we wear through the healing, sanctifying, and salvific power emanating from the Sacred Species. His love makes us like unto Himself, bringing us into our true identity as a people created in the image and likeness of God.

Chapter 4
Allured by the Christ

Days later, on the verge of despair, I called Fr. Bob Sears, a Jesuit priest who had given a retreat I had attended a month earlier. Providentially, when I called, he answered the phone. An hour later I was sitting in his parlor. Before I could begin to speak, I began to cry profusely. Through the weeping, I recalled my experience at the elevation of the Host, and I managed to blurt out those same words. I was sure that God was through with me. He was done. It was over. I truly felt God was killing me.

In a moment of calm, the priest finally spoke. He told me that, yes, God was killing me and that, yes, He allowed His own Son to be killed for our sake, and that, yes, I would have to die. He assured me that God was by no means done with me, but was only beginning with me. Those words liberated me. I think in that moment I began my descent into nothingness.

Chapter 16
Murdered or Martyred?
The Death of Mary Stachowicz

For now, suffice it to say that there is no end to the escalation of violence that plagues a world just embarked on its third millennium. It seems to me this violence is symptomatic of the world sitting on a keg of dynamite whose flickering flame is ever so close to igniting devastation unlike anything ever known since the dawn of creation. As the Holy Father mentioned when he consecrated the Third Millennium to Our Lady on October 13, 2000, Mankind can turn this planet into a garden or a pile of rubble. Every day that passes we seem to choose the rubble. The victims of violence are thrown into the darkness of grief, loneliness, and confusion through the words, misdeeds, and sickness of a people no longer grounded in God. In other places and at other times in history, prophets sounded the alarm in an attempt to bring people to their knees before it was too late.

Chapter 5
The Carnival that
Dropped out of Heaven

On the evening of August 28th, I was called to the office. A gentleman came to ask my permission to transfer a festival and carnival from Wicker Park to St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish. The space originally allotted for the festival was insufficient to accommodate the carnival, and so it needed to be relocated immediately. The festival had been scheduled to take place between September 13th and September 16th. He assured me that if we would grant him the permission, it would then become the parish's festival. What normally takes a parish a year to plan has now been secured within a matter of days. At the center of the celebration would be the 18-foot Icon of The Divine Mercy. Only yards from the icon would be a tent where we would expose the Blessed Sacrament for 24-hour adoration during the days of the festivities. This gentleman and his crew would provide the tent for the adoration chapel as well as all-night security guards. Our Lady, aware of my schedule and my limitations, had prepared her own celebration for the return of the icon.

Chapter 14
And He Wept

As time passes, I feel myself more and more bound to Jesus and His body, the Church. The conflict and the struggle, though, seem more intense, compelling me to spend hours a day in prayer for the mere sake of survival. At the age of 46, I feel it may have been easier to have become a saint if I had died at the age of 33. Even at this juncture in my life, after 16 years in the intimate company of Jesus, I still so often feel like a mere boy of 12, asking God to be so good as to make me a priest. If I should live a long life, I hope, like Simeon, one day to behold the Christ and ask the Master to send me to death in peace for having seen the salvation of those I love. At times I weep interiorly, but knowing God dwells within me is sufficient cause for a joy unsurpassed by sorrow.

Chapter 1
Our Lady's Parish

On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood, May 25, 1999, a darkness was lifted that enabled me to pray with greater ease, especially to pray the Rosary. For years I had prayed the Rosary with great difficulty. Just lifting the rosary into my hands was a burden; it had the weight of a rock. This troubled me since I had always been devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary. My vocation to the priesthood and religious life was born from and deeply woven in a spirituality that was Eucharistic and Marian, but in the past several years my perception of those spiritual realities had become obscured, if not totally hidden.

Chapter 27
Let the Children Come Unto Me

The Sanctuary of The Divine Mercy brings the promise of illumination, satisfying the soul's thirst and hunger for God - a thirst and hunger perhaps unknown to the pilgrim who, in silence, steps into the sacred space of sanctuary. There, the unheard call, having been suppressed by the cacophony of the world, awakens the soul to the child within and opens its ears to the whisper of God's voice, that to the child belongs the kingdom of God.

Unencumbered by the rude noise of the world and free from false teachers and false prophets who zealously labor to undo millennia of living tradition, the Sanctuary of The Divine Mercy promises the redefinition and the re-identification of a covenant people. As in the days of youth when innocence made the heart receptive to the breath of God's Spirit, the sanctuary opens the soul to the secret things of heaven. The Blessed Virgin Mary wishes to speak to our hearts, so that the sacred mysteries of the holy faith may be seen anew through the eyes of the child.

Chapter 24
Defense of the Iconic Monstrance

From the days of my youth, the Blessed Virgin Mary has stood watch as if from a distance, waiting for the appointed time and the appropriate place to enslave me so that I more fully respond to the specific will of God. She does not give me solace in the comfort of her home, but keeps me marching in cadence to the movement of the Holy Spirit, in the company of her son. The battle is real and is being fought on many fronts. If it weren't for the many signs Our Lady gives, I don't think I'd have strength for perseverance. In spite of the struggle, she especially sustains me through the faith of humble people who daily remind me that God, indeed, comes to the help of His servants.

Chapter 25
Through the Eye of the Storm
She Guides Us

The Sanctuary of The Divine Mercy is destined to be a Bethlehem whose ambience, wrapped in the silence of Our Lady"s prayer, will bring to birth the Christ conceived in the souls of the Church's offspring and will conceive Christ in the hearts of non-believers, bringing them to conversion. The seed that now germinates will bear fruit, in due season and in due time, not only in the realization of a perpetual adoration chapel and the grounds adorned with religious iconography, but also in the manifestation of the Church's catholicity. As with the pilgrims of Bethlehem, the Church's catholicity will be expressed in people of different ethnicities, races, ages, and creeds who will find their way to this sacred ground for the holy encounter.

Chapter 26
The Call to Arms -
Defining the Priesthood

A healthy and holy Church depends on the sanctity of those who set the standard. Priests have publicly surrendered themselves to Christ in a posture of self-giving sacrifice. In the footsteps of Jesus, they must step to the beat of a different drummer and make the lonely walk, leading others to sanctuary - to the solitude of the Christ, who brings rest to the soul.

They make the lonely walk donned in the flesh of their own humanity, with needs and inclinations no different from those of other men. Satan, who in unquestionable fidelity befriends the priest, remains the faithful foe whose slithering seductions militate against the sacrificial and sacred character of the priestly consecration. The priest knows that left to himself his spirit is willing, but his flesh is weak. If not centered in the Christ, Satan so easily lures him away from sacrifice and into selfishness - away from the sacred and into the secular.

Chapter 23
The Statue of The Divine Mercy
Goes to the Continent of Africa

In her apparitions in Kibeho, the Holy Mother of God said, "If I am now turning to the parish of Kibeho or to the Diocese of Butare or to Rwanda or to the whole of Africa, I am concerned with and turning to the whole world." Each day, as I look at and listen to the details of the lives of people, I wonder whether a genocide has begun in our own land. The shedding of blood is hidden from our eyes, as in secret, the unheard cry of the unborn succumbs to this slaughter. Their deaths are symptomatic of a culture that has turned away from God and seeks to fill the void in the wrong places, with the wrong things, and through the wrong people. The rejection of God and the subsequent renunciation of responsibility for the work of life through the nurturing of faith and family have led to the convenient repudiation of the unborn.

Chapter 3
Never Alone in Gethsemane

Again, the words that Our Lady spoke to Juan Diego on the Hill of Tepeyac nearly 500 years ago re-echo with new urgency in this our time, "I deeply wish that a temple be erected here so that in it I may show and give all my love, compassion, help, and defense, for I am your merciful mother. To you, and all the inhabitants of this land, and to all those who love me and put their trust in me know that I hear the cry of my children and I come to relieve their miseries and pain." Indeed, there is much misery and pain. As a priest, I see it daily in the lives of our people. Often their eyes betray a deep sadness and an inner turmoil, which is void of any hope or joy.