by Kenneth Craycraft

Near the end of his novel, Brighton Rock, Graham Greene details a conversation between an old priest and one of the main characters of the novel, a young woman named Rose. The interchange takes place after the sudden, violent death of another character, Pinky, whose life had fallen well short of saintly or even good. Justly concerned about the state of Pinky’s soul, Rose laments to an old priest, “He’s damned. He knew what he was about. He was a Catholic, too.”

But the old priest is not so quick as Rose to condemn Pinky. “The Church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from mercy,” he tells Rose. This counsel follows what is perhaps the most famous sentence Greene ever wrote, which the priest had already said, “You cannot conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone … the appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.” No time in the liturgical calendar is more appropriate to consider this appalling, strange mercy than Easter.

As most readers of this column are aware, the eighth day of Easter is known as Divine Mercy Sunday. While this designation is as familiar to Catholics as most other major feasts, it is actually a recent addition to the Roman calendar. The Divine Mercy devotion had been celebrated informally since the late 1930s, which itself is recent in terms of the history of the Church. Its official title, however, was not declared until April 2000 and was celebrated for the first time by the universal Church on April 22, 2001. It is no coincidence that the designation of this great feast was made by our first Polish pope, St. John Paul II, and coincided with the canonization of the great Polish mystic, St. Faustina Kowalska, on April 30, 2000.

St. Faustina is sometimes known as the “Apostle of Divine Mercy,” due to her account of visions of, and conversations with, Jesus in the 1930s. These accounts are recorded in her posthumously published diary, Divine Mercy in My Soul. Among other things, St. Faustina says that Jesus commissioned her to paint an image of her vision of Jesus. “I want the image solemnly blessed on the first Sunday after Easter,” Jesus told Faustina, “and I want it to be venerated publicly so that every soul may know about it.”

Not having the skill to paint the image herself, Faustina described her vision to Polish painter Eugeniusz Kazimirowski who finished the original painting in 1934. The version of the Divine Mercy painting with which most of us Catholics are familiar, however, was painted by another Polish artist, Adolf Hyła, in 1943, five years after St. Faustina’s premature death from tuberculosis at age 33. The image commonly used in Divine Mercy Sunday processions is a reproduction of the Hyła painting.

As important as the Divine Mercy image is, the words Jesus spoke to St. Faustina are even more powerful and inspiring than the visual image. This is because Jesus revealed to St. Faustina that His mercy is strange and counterintuitive. Indeed, in the words of Greene’s old priest, God’s mercy is appalling to the unbeliever mind and strange to everyone.

In the first instance, Jesus distinguishes between mercy and justice in His conversations with St. Faustina. “Speak to the world about My unfathomable mercy,” Our Lord tells her. “It is a sign for the end times; after it will come the day of justice” (entry 848). In another place, Faustina writes, “Jesus looked at me and said, ‘Souls perish in spite of My bitter Passion. I am giving them the last hope of salvation; that is, the Feast of Divine Mercy…. [T]ell souls about this great mercy of Mine because the awful day … of My justice is near.’”

This contrast of the mercy of God with His justice is a central paradox in Christian theology. The contrast is resolved, of course, precisely in Christ’s “bitter Passion,” as He put it to St. Faustina. The “awful day of judgment” was visited upon Jesus in our stead. But this act of justice—Jesus giving himself over to the judgment of the Father for us—is also a manifestation of His mercy. Jesus takes our just punishment—what we rightly deserve—and offers it to the Father in the ultimate act of Divine Mercy. As the Blessed Mother told Faustina in another vision, “the Second Coming of Him who will come” will not be a day of mercy but of judgment. “Oh, how terrible is that day!” she exclaimed (entry 635). The Blessed Virgin emphasized the urgency of communicating the Divine Mercy message to all. But the offer must be accepted through an act of repentance.

In Brighton Rock, Graham Greene frequently averts to the maxim that one could be saved “between the stirrup and the ground.” “You could be saved between the stirrup and the ground,” one character says, “but you couldn’t be saved if you didn’t repent.” The image is of a horseman—typically a soldier—repenting of his sins in the brief moment between being shot from his horse and hitting the ground. The point is not concerned with the brevity of the moment but rather the persistence of the offer of Divine Mercy. God’s judgment is sure. But His Mercy is appallingly strange, offered persistently to all people. For God’s Mercy is not merely appalling and strange; it is also relentless.

Dr. Kenneth Craycraft holds the James J. Gardner Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary & School of Theology. He is the author of Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America.

This article appeared in the April 2026 edition of The Catholic Telegraph Magazine. For your complimentary subscription, click here.