By Marc Massery
During a week in which the entire world had been on edge as a result of a global pandemic, just a few days after the Marian Fathers had to cancel their annual Divine Mercy Sunday special events, and only a few hours after President Trump declared a national emergency in response to the coronavirus, a little miracle happened in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
As a staff writer for the Marian Fathers at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, I’d been in touch with a wonderful octogenarian from Glenview, Illinois, named Theresa Tirpak. Few Divine Mercy devotees spread the Gospel as eagerly and consistently as Theresa. Everywhere she’s gone for the past few decades, she’s carried Divine Mercy prayer cards around with her, silently imploring God for opportunities to evangelize.
“I never leave home without them,” she said.
Few Divine Mercy devotees receive as many signal graces from the Lord as Theresa, too. She’s always got a story to tell about how the Lord intervened in her life — how coincidences, big and small, reminded her that God is close.
“It’s never something that I choose,” she said. “It [just] happens to me.”
For example, in the year 2000, two weeks before Theresa went overseas to attend the canonization of St. Faustina, she went to see a doctor because she had developed a tumor on her arm. Her doctor said it would have to be removed right away when she returned from Rome.
She wasn’t going to St. Faustina’s canonization in order to ask for a healing. “We were going in order to give honor to the mercy of God,” she said. Nevertheless, she came back from the canonization without any signs of the tumor.
Of course, she didn’t miss this opportunity to give her doctor a Divine Mercy prayer card and tell him all about St. Faustina.
Her most recent God-incidence was a little less dramatic, but just as hopeful. Theresa’s family members have been Marian Helpers since the Marians first began spreading the Divine Mercy message and devotion back in the 1940s. This is evidenced by the fact that just this past spring, Theresa discovered amongst her belongings a 1944 Chaplet of Divine Mercy prayer card printed by the Marians in Stockbridge. The archivist of the Marians said he doesn’t have on record a Divine Mercy prayer card that dates back nearly that far.
Theresa generously offered to send us the prayer card to safeguard this historic document. (That’s a photo of it, to the right.) I was also hoping to write a story about it. After all, it’s such an old artifact that it contains the original English translation from the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska.
When I returned home from Stockbridge on March 13, just hours after hearing the announcement of a national state of emergency, I found the small package Theresa promised she would send me in my mailbox at my home in Pittsfield.
As I carefully handled this delicate artifact, it became clear — yet another God-incidence involving Theresa Tirpak. At the top of the prayer card, it says:
(Chaplet)
Corona of Mercy
“Corona” of mercy? I have worked for the Marian Fathers for three years. Never once had I heard this word used in relation to Divine Mercy. What are the chances I would discover this prayer card no one has seen in decades just as the normal order of business was unravelling in the United States due to the coronavirus?
Jesus says in St. Faustina’s Diary, “Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy” (300). Could this be a sign that the Lord is using the coronavirus pandemic to awaken more souls to His mercy?
According to Fr. Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, world-renowned expert in the message of Divine Mercy and vice-postulator in North America for the canonization cause of St. Faustina, “korona” means “crown” in Polish. “Koronka” is the diminutive of the same word.
“In Polish, the Rosary is called a ‘little crown,’” he said. “[So] ‘koronka’ means ‘chaplet.’ The Fathers who were translating those things were not too familiar with Polish and the nuances, so that’s what they chose to call it — [‘Corona’ instead of ‘Koronka’].”
Theresa hadn’t realized the connection between the prayer card and the global pandemic until I called her to tell her I received her package in the mail.
“There is a message in that, definitely,” she said. “I’m so glad that you’re pointing that out. We just got word that the whole Archdiocese [of Chicago] is shutting down, no Masses, no anything.”
Though Theresa hasn’t been able to go to Mass herself since January as a result of a severely fractured hip, she mourns the temporary loss of the Sacraments for all Catholics.
“My whole life centered around getting up each morning and going to Mass. That was the center of my life,” she said. “I hope it’s going to change. I do listen to Mass [on the radio] but, of course, receiving a Spiritual Communion, not receiving our Lord’s Body and Blood, is a difficulty I have yet to conquer.”
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