Most of us meet Faustina’s vision of hell already turned into a poster. Flames. A list of seven torments read too quickly. A talk that uses her name to frighten a room and then wonders why the same room will not come back for Divine Mercy Sunday. The Diary itself is larger and stranger than that use of it. The page about hell sits inside a book whose ordinary weather is mercy.
In the autumn of 1936, in Vilnius, Sister Faustina was led by an angel. She wrote, under obedience, what we now call entry 741. The first torture that constitutes hell, she said, is the loss of God. Fire comes fourth. She was told to leave it in writing so that no soul could find an excuse by saying there is no hell, or that nobody has ever been there. What she put down was, in her own words, a pale shadow. Most of the souls she noticed there were people who had not believed the place existed. When she came back to herself she prayed more fervently for the conversion of sinners.
This little book is not a tour and not a weapon. It walks through the details popular talks usually skip, and then it sends the reader back to the rest of the Diary — the chaplet, the hour of mercy, the feast she was asked to announce. Private revelation does not add a new dogma. It can send us back to a dogma we have been too polite to mention, and to a mercy we have been too frightened to trust.
A Silent Homilies booklet. Written to be read in one or two sittings.