Faustina Kowalska

Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), born Helena Kowalska in Głogowiec, Poland, was a Polish nun and mystic whose private revelations concerning Divine Mercy have become one of the most significant devotional movements in modern Catholicism, practiced by millions of Catholics worldwide. Born the third of ten children to a poor, devout peasant family, Helena had only three years of formal education. She felt called to religious life from age seven, but her parents could not afford the dowry required by most convents, and she spent her teenage years working as a housekeeper and nanny. In 1924, while attending a dance in Łódź, she experienced a vision of the suffering Christ that impelled her to leave immediately for Warsaw, where after being rejected by several convents, she was accepted into the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in 1925. As Sister Faustina, she lived a hidden, outwardly ordinary religious life, working as a cook, gardener, and gatekeeper at various convents. But beginning on February 22, 1931, she began receiving a series of mystical visions and inner locutions from Christ, who asked her to become the 'Apostle of My Mercy.' He instructed her to have an image painted showing himself with rays of red and white light streaming from his heart, beneath the inscription 'Jesus, I Trust in You.' He also dictated the Chaplet of Divine Mercy and asked that the first Sunday after Easter be designated the Feast of Divine Mercy. Faustina recorded these experiences in her 'Diary: Divine Mercy in My Soul,' a 600-page spiritual journal that chronicles her mystical life with remarkable detail and psychological transparency. Though initially met with suspicion — the Vatican banned the devotion from 1959 to 1978 — the diary was rehabilitated after a thorough investigation, largely championed by Kraków's Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II. Faustina died of tuberculosis on October 5, 1938, at age thirty-three. She was canonized by John Paul II on April 30, 2000 — the day he officially established the Feast of Divine Mercy. The Divine Mercy image and chaplet are now among the most widely distributed devotional objects in the Catholic world.