Drowning in Divine Mercy?

By an extraordinary coincidence, today is the feast day of both the saint who gave the Divine Mercy devotion to the world, and of one of the disciples of Saint Benedict.

Interestingly, neither of these feasts are on the universal calendar.

Saint Mary Faustina Kowalska (1905 – 1938) was a Polish nun who received a vision of Christ as the “King of Divine Mercy” in 1931. Her confessor insisted that she undergo a complete psychiatric evaluation. The doctor determined that she was perfectly sane.

Eventually her diary and her explanation of the Divine Mercy reached the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome. Thanks to a faulty translation of the documents, they were suppressed in 1959, by which time the Saint was long dead of tuberculosis.

In 1977 the popular Cardinal Archbishop Wojtyła of Kraków asked the now-renamed Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to review the case, this time with better translations.

By the time Cardinal Wojtyła was elected Pope John Paul II, the Congregation had rehabilitated Sister Faustina and her devotions. She was raised to the altars in 2000.

The story kind of reminds me of Saint Pio.

I have written before of my devotion to the Divine Mercy. I am also an Oblate of the Order of Saint Benedict, and on the Benedictine calendar today is also the feast of Saint Placid.

Saint Placid (fl. 6th cen.) was the son of a Roman patrician. As a boy, his family gave him over to the monastery at Subiaco, where he became one of Saint Benedict’s first disciples.

He is perhaps best known for having entirely failed to drown. Here’s the earliest known written version of the story:

On a certain day, as venerable Benedict was in his cell, the foresaid young Placidus, the holy man’s monk, went out to take up water at the lake, and putting down his pail carelessly, fell in himself after it, whom the water forthwith carried away from the land so far as one may shoot an arrow. The man of God, being in his cell, by and by knew this, and called in haste for Maurus, saying: “Brother Maurus, run as fast as you can, for Placidus, that went to the lake to fetch water, is fallen in, and is carried a good way off.”

A strange thing, and since the time of Peter the Apostle never heard of! Maurus, craving his father’s blessing, and departing in all haste at his commandment, ran to that place upon the water, to which the young lad was carried by force thereof, thinking that he had all that while gone upon the land: and taking fast hold of him by the hair of his head, in all haste he returned back again: and so soon as he was at land, coming to himself he looked behind him, and then knew very well that he had before run upon the water: and that which before he durst not have presumed, being now done and past, he both marveled, and was afraid at that which he had done.

(Life of Saint Benedict by Pope Saint Gregory I, chapter 7)

Presumably, Saint Placid went on to do other things as well, since his name is listed in an ancient Benedictine litany of the Saints. What those might be, we have no idea.

It’s kind of fun that two saints whose lives intersect with mine, as a devotee of the Divine Mercy and as a Benedictine, should have the same feast day.