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Only In Print: Former City Dwellers Embrace Tranquility to Help Spread Devotion to the Divine Mercy

Thousands attend Divine Mercy Sunday on the weekend after Easter Sunday at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy, Stockbridge, Mass. The devotion is based on the writings of St Faustina Kowalska (below right) during the 1930s in Poland. Jesus appeared to her clad in a white garment with beams radiating from his heart — one red, the other pale. The image has been replicated in various paintings (below left).(Photos: Fred LeBlanc, Catholic Observer via OSV, Wikimedia Commons)

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. — After a 40-year career in finance, Frank Rizzo, with his wife, Angela, swapped the bustle of New York City for an upstate retirement home near a lake. 

That was in 2003, but the couple from Queens saw their new community as a bastion of “soft Catholicism” where the consequences of sin were downplayed — a stark contrast to the lessons they learned at Catholic schools in the Diocese of Brooklyn.


The rest of this article can be found exclusively in the May 20 printed version of The Tablet. You can buy it at church for $1, or you can receive future editions of the paper in your mailbox at a discounted rate by subscribing hereThank you for supporting Catholic journalism.