Most pilgrims who come to Kraków for Divine Mercy never notice that, a short walk across a bridge, another shrine has risen on ground that once looked like nothing a church would want. The ground is still called the White Seas. The name is not poetry. It is the old name for the lime-white waste ponds of the Solvay soda factory.
Between 1940 and 1944 a young man named Karol Wojtyła worked in that factory. He walked there in wooden shoes. On the way he used to pray in the small convent chapel where Sister Faustina had died. After he died as Pope, the Church in Kraków chose that same waste ground for a house of thanksgiving and named it from the first words of his pontificate: Do not be afraid.
This little book tells how the house was raised. It tells of a foundation stone blessed by Benedict XVI on the Błonia, of a drop of the Pope’s blood set under a marble altar, of a side chapel copied from the Wawel crypt where he said his first Mass, and of the cassock he wore on the day he was shot. It is not a guidebook and not a museum catalogue. It is the story of a labourer’s road that became a shrine, and of two sanctuaries — Mercy and this one — now joined by a bridge.
A Silent Homilies booklet. Written to be read in one or two sittings.