Divine Mercy and Miracle Flight 1549

Fred Barretta, with his wife, Liz, and their children, Jonathan, 14, Evan, 13, Lauren, 9, and Benjamin, 7. After Fred was pulled to safety aboard a ferry boat, he called his wife back home in Charlotte and said: “I’m doing OK.” She responded, “That’s great. I’m doing OK, too.” She didn’t yet know about Flight 1549. “I had to explain how the plane just crashed into the Hudson River,” Fred recalls with a laugh.

A banker on a business trip in New York City, Fred Barreta had just checked into his hotel room. He had about 20 minutes down time before he had to meet his colleagues.

For some reason he decided to clean out his briefcase, something he hadn’t done in a long time. As he emptied it out, he came across a booklet he had stuffed into a pocket years ago on praying the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy. He recalls having prayed it a few times years ago. But by Jan 15, 2009, it was a good intention mislaid — among spreadsheets and quarterly reports and matters that seemed far more pressing.

Only two weeks prior, Fred had made a New Year’s resolution to try to get into better spiritual shape. Here in this hotel room was an opportunity to fulfill it. So he followed along in the booklet and prayed the chaplet, a prayer our Lord gave St. Maria Faustina Kowalska in the 1930s during a series of revelations that have sparked the modern Divine Mercy movement.

The time happened to be 3 o’clock, known as the Hour of Great Mercy, when Jesus died on the cross. Fred considered that detail the following day — as he was preparing to die.

He was among the 155 people to board a jetliner at LaGuardia Airport bound for Charlotte, N.C., his home town. Ninety seconds after takeoff, the jet apparently hit a flock of geese, the engines exploded and the plane lost power at 3,200 feet. The aircraft was out of reach from any airfield. It lost thrust and altitude. Everything became eerily quiet. Fred cinched his seatbelt. His left hand clutched the armrest, his heart race, his face flushed.

He thought about his family — his wife and four young children. He thought about God, about death, about thrust, about an extraordinary promise made by Jesus that he read the previous day in that booklet.

“Prepare for impact,” the pilot said over the PA system.

What was the promise? Suddenly, it came to him, the last passage he read before heading off to his meeting. Jesus said to St. Faustina, “This is the hour of great mercy. In this hour, I will refuse nothing to the soul that makes a request of Me in virtue of My passion” (Diary of St. Faustina, 1320).

As the ground surged into view, Fred looked at his watch. It was 3:30, the Hour of Great Mercy!

“I prayed with every fiber of emotion and sincerity I could muster, “God, please be merciful to us,” Fred recalled two weeks later.

Miracle on the Hudson

In the crash landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River on January 15, no one was seriously injured!

Politicians and news anchors quickly dubbed it the “Miracle on the Hudson.” In the history of aviation no jetliner had ever made an emergency landing on water without casualties.

Then, there were the news images of a US Airways Airbus floating gently down the frigid Hudson, like some sort of breaching, people-friendly, aquatic creature. The passengers stood on its wings, calmly awaiting rescue. Amidst all the news of economic collapse, of tens of thousands of layoffs on a weekly basis, of families in peril, or a reckoning at hand for a culture of greed, this plane, these passengers, its pilot, all served as a sort of restorative balm on our collective conscious.

The story made you gasp, gulp hard, smile widely, and be thankful. Thankful for what? For good news. For heroes in the pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, and the rest of the crew. Thankful in the knowledge that in the panic-filled moments when the plane lurched to a stop it wasn’t every man and woman for himself or herself. Thankful that humanity’s better nature was on display. Thankful the incident wasn’t terrorist-related, but apparently geese-related. Thankful that a guy like Fred Barreta, 41, would live to walk through the door of his home once again, hug his wife and children, and make sure they knew he loved them — that he always had and that he always will.

A couple of weeks before the flight, Fred has prayed the Rosary for the first time in years. He had recently learned of the 15 promises that, as legend has it, the Virgin Mary made to St. Dominic and Blessed Alanus to all who pray the Rosary with a faithful heart. Fred remembers thinking at the time, “Are those promises real?” He feels he recently received his answer.

God was doing more than preparing him for death: God was preparing him for life.