Santa Faustina Kowalska

Helena Kowalska, later known in religion as Sister Maria Faustina, was born on 25 August 1905 in the village of Głogowiec in what is now central Poland, then part of the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. She was the third of ten children of Stanisław Kowalski, a carpenter and farmer, and Marianna Kowalska. The family was poor and devoutly Catholic. Helena received only a few years of elementary education and from childhood worked to help support the household, later taking positions as a domestic servant in nearby towns including Aleksandrów Łódzki and Łódź. She later recounted that she first felt a vocation to religious life around the age of seven, though her parents were reluctant to allow her to enter a convent.

In 1924, while attending a dance in Łódź, she experienced a vision of the suffering Christ that prompted her to leave for Warsaw in search of a religious community. After being refused by several congregations, she was accepted in August 1925 by the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. She received the name Sister Maria Faustina and made her first profession of vows in 1928 and her perpetual vows in 1933. During her thirteen years in religious life she was assigned to houses in Warsaw, Kraków, Płock, and Vilnius, where she performed ordinary duties such as cooking, gardening, and answering the door. Contemporaries described her as quiet, obedient, and unremarkable in outward appearance.

Beginning in 1931, Faustina reported extraordinary mystical experiences. She stated that Jesus appeared to her in her cell in Płock and instructed her to have an image painted of himself as she saw him, with two rays of light streaming from his heart, one red and one pale, and with the words "Jesus, I trust in You." He asked that the image be venerated throughout the world and that the Sunday after Easter be observed as the Feast of Divine Mercy. He also taught her a chaplet of prayers using ordinary rosary beads, now known as the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and spoke of his desire for a new religious congregation dedicated to mercy. Faustina recorded these revelations, together with accounts of her interior life, sufferings, and conversations with her spiritual directors, in notebooks that were later compiled as her Diary, Divine Mercy in My Soul.

Faustina’s health declined steadily; she suffered from tuberculosis that affected her lungs and gastrointestinal tract, as well as other illnesses. She died in Kraków on 5 October 1938 at the age of thirty-three. After her death her writings circulated among the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy and beyond. A 1959 notification from the Holy Office placed restrictions on the devotion, but these were lifted in 1978. Karol Wojtyła, as Archbishop of Kraków, opened her cause for beatification; as Pope John Paul II he beatified her on 18 April 1993 and canonized her on 30 April 2000 in St. Peter’s Square, declaring her the first saint of the Great Jubilee. The Divine Mercy devotion associated with her name, including the image, the chaplet, and Divine Mercy Sunday, has since spread worldwide.