The Gates of Dawn
The Role of Mary, Mother of Mercy:
In 1503 the residents of Vilnius guarding against enemy attacks under the order of Alexander, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, started building the Vilnius city defensive wall. It is thought that the foundation-stone, sanctified by the bishop was put at the place of the Gates of Dawn. There were two paintings on the gate, on the inside, the painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Mercy who embraces everybody who stays in the city and on the outside, the painting of Jesus, the Saviour, who sees all the ingoing and outgoing. Mary portrayed in the painting is the real Star of Dawn and Hope especially during times of disaster, oppression and occupation. Not only Catholics but also Orthodox Christians and Greek Catholics found shelter near Her. Carmelites who moved to Vilnius in 1626 started building the convent and the Church of St. Theresa of Avila. To take care of the painting of the Gates of Dawn they built a chapel and arranged prayer times. In 1927 when the painting was adorned with papal crowns (Pope Pius XI), it received the title of Mother of Mercy. The Gates of Dawn was especially dear to Sister Faustina who belonged to the convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. The Gates of Dawn are particularly precious. It was exactly at the Gates of Dawn in 1935, at Easter, at the end of the Jubilee Year of the World Redemption, that the image of the Merciful Jesus, which had been decorated with wreaths of flowers by Faustina herself in the evening, was displayed for the first time in the Gates of Dawn as an illustration of the work of Fr. M. Sopocko’s sermon about the mercy of God.
St. John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Dives in Misericordia: “Mary is also the one who obtained mercy in a particular and exceptional way, as no other person has. (…) No one has experienced, to the same degree as the Mother of the crucified One, the mystery of the cross, the overwhelming encounter of divine transcendent justice with love: that kiss given by mercy to justice. No one has received into his heart, as much as Mary did, that mystery, that truly divine dimension of the redemption effected on Calvary by means of the death of the Son, together with the sacrifice of her maternal heart, together with her definitive “fiat”. Mary, then, is the one who has the deepest knowledge of the mystery of God’s mercy.”