Rita Kvašienė, wife of the artist Vaidotas Kvašys: “There are far-fetched stories, but this one about Vilnius – the City of Mercy – is definitely not one of them.”

The Message of God’s Mercy in Word, Deeds, and Prayer

Vilnius is gifted with a special message of mercy. Its residents, touched by it, themselves become carriers of the message of mercy.

The wife of the painter Vaidotas Kvašys, Rita Kvašienė, shares the family’s experience of prayer and the story of how the Chaplet of Divine Mercy became part of their daily rhythm: “Around 1988 we began praying the Chaplet every day at 3 p.m.” In addition, R. Kvašienė emphasizes that in her late husband Vaidotas Kvašys’s artistic legacy there is an abundance of works on the theme of mercy.

How did the message of mercy reach your family and how did it transform it?

It could have been around 1982 when my husband’s late mother, the artist Angelė Kvašienė, suggested before Easter that we pray a novena to the Divine Mercy. She had copied it by hand from somewhere into a little notebook, together with a few quotes from the “Diary” and the Litany of Divine Mercy. We managed to preserve those completely worn-out, thoroughly prayed-over notes.

Perhaps a year later, a friend from Rome brought us a little book in Italian about Divine Mercy. We compared the prayer texts — everything matched — and put it in a drawer because the sweet Jesus [depicted] walking on bathroom tiles annoyed us. The blackened one we got from mother, copied on an “Era” machine, felt like our own. At that time, we still didn’t know that other artists had depicted it [Divine Mercy] in the world. Only the Vilnius image spoke to us.