For someone who is dying, or for the whole world at once. Five decades on ordinary Rosary beads, about ten minutes, and it asks for one thing over and over: mercy — on us, and on everyone.
It is built like the Rosary and does the opposite thing with the beads. The Rosary gives your mind a scene to rest in while the words repeat; this gives it nothing but the one request, fifty times, until the request is the only thing left in the room. Have mercy on us and on the whole world. Not on me. On us, and on everyone, and it never narrows.
The large-bead prayer is the strange one. It offers the Father his own Son — body, blood, soul and divinity — in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world. You are not offering anything of yours. You are pointing at what was already given, and asking that it count.
The Diary reports a promise attached to praying it beside someone who is dying. This site does not make promises and does not repeat that one in its own voice; it records that the Diary makes it, and that a great many people have prayed this at a bedside because of it.
Helena Kowalska, a Polish nun in her thirties with two winters of schooling, wrote it down in Vilnius on the thirteenth and fourteenth of September 1935, as words she reported being taught. It is in her Diary at paragraphs 474 to 476. She died of tuberculosis three years later, at thirty-three, in Kraków, and the Diary — six notebooks — went into a drawer.
Then the part nobody tells. In 1959 the Holy Office in Rome prohibited the devotion — a bad translation of the Diary had reached them, and on the strength of it the whole thing was shut down for nineteen years. It was the Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, who had the prohibition examined and lifted, on 15 April 1978. Six months later he was pope. He canonized her on 30 April 2000 and made the Sunday after Easter Divine Mercy Sunday for the whole Church on the same day. A devotion that was banned in living memory is now on the calendar.
It became the most widely prayed new devotion of the twentieth century, which is a large claim and probably true. It is prayed at three in the afternoon in hospitals and hospices and kitchens, because the Diary asks for that hour — the hour of the death on the cross — to be kept, and because it takes ten minutes. It is on the site's apparitions index among the reported revelations of the last century, with its standing.
The words on the beads are Faustina's, and they are the reason this page is honest about what it is missing. When the Marians answer, they go in.