Fr Jarek Kurek OSB
Quite recently the death occurred of a Polish man whose name was Ernest Bryll. He was a well-known writer and poet; a man of wide cultural horizons. He had a particular affection for Irish Culture and because of his love for this country he gave his Polish readers many Irish gems. For instance, he made a translation into Polish of Irish poems from the 6th to the 19th centuries. But also, and I have this book here with me, he left us with a most fascinating account of the
journey he made with his wife across Ireland, a journey that started in Dublin, where the two of them followed the trail of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and continued until they eventually reached Dingle and the Blasket Islands, mapping out for the reader all the cultural phenomena they encountered.
Mr Bryll lived in Ireland, back in the early 90s’, while he was serving as the first Polish ambassador to Ireland. And it was during those years that he had a very memorable encounter with a Polish nun called Sr Faustina Kowalska. Well, like it or not, you are stuck with the Poles today…
To be perfectly honest with you, Mr Bryll, didn’t think too much of Sr
Faustina’s revelations initially. To him they seemed quite odd. But he was lucky enough to be challenged by some Irish people who helped him to appreciate her. He happened to meet a local Irish woman, the owner of the hotel he was staying in, and in that hotel there were some pictures of Sr Faustina and the Divine Mercy. That landlady said to him: ‘You are from Poland, are you not? Tell me everything about this Sr Faustina, because, you know, her revelations are very important to us here in Ireland’. The Ambassador looked at her quite perplexed and thought: ‘What am I supposed to tell her? I don’t really know anything
about them’.
On that occasion he managed to save face by remaining rather vague. However, that conversation made him read up on Sr Faustina and her legacy, to avoid similar future embarrassment. At this stage it was still too soon for him to read the actual Diary containing her revelations and he still maintained a low opinion of these writings. He believed
they were rather chaotic, a folksy text produced by an uneducated nun and not worth his scholarly attention.
It was only some years later that he finally started to seriously explore the spiritual experience of the Diary. Only then did he discover that there was far more to this than he had originally though. This highly educated man humbly admitted to himself that this Diary, so often
unappreciated and ridiculed, could actually have a transformative power on its reader.
And a spiritual transformation is what Ambassador Bryll experienced as he carefully read these pages. This extraordinary man subsequently became a herald and promotor of Divine Mercy. We read in the Diary those powerful words that Jesus spoke to Sr Faustina: ‘I want to give Myself to souls, I yearn for souls, My daughter. On the day of My feast, the Feast of Mercy, you will go through the whole world and bring fainting souls to the spring of My mercy, and I shall heal and strengthen them, amen’.