Saint Faustina Kowalska

Life

1. 1905 – 1924

   The girl from Głogowiec

   Helena Kowalska was born on 25 August 1905 into a poor but devout farming family, the third of ten children of Stanisław and Marianna. She was baptised in the parish of Świnice Warckie and went to school for less than three years.

   At sixteen she went into service in Aleksandrów Łódzki and then Łódź to help her parents. She had long wished to enter a convent, but her parents refused. In 1924, at a dance in Łódź, she saw the suffering Jesus beside her. She left, went into the cathedral and heard Him tell her to go to Warsaw and enter a convent.

   

2. 1925 – 1932

   Small tasks in the convent

   On 1 August 1925 she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw. On 30 April 1926 she received the habit and the name Maria Faustina of the Blessed Sacrament; she made her first vows in April 1928. She worked in turn as cook, gardener and doorkeeper in several houses, among them Vilnius (1929) and Płock (from 1930).

   On the evening of 22 February 1931, in her cell in Płock, she saw Jesus in a white garment, with two rays, one red and one pale, coming from His chest. He asked her to have an image painted as she saw Him, signed “Jesus, I trust in You”, and to make the Sunday after Easter the Feast of Mercy (Diary, §47–49).

   

3. 1933 – 1936

   Vilnius: the image, the Diary, the chaplet

   On 1 May 1933 she made her perpetual vows at Łagiewniki (Kraków) and returned to Vilnius as gardener. There she met Fr Michał Sopoćko, now Blessed, who became her confessor and director. He had a psychiatrist examine her, who found her entirely sound, and he asked the painter Eugeniusz Kazimirowski to paint the image from her description. It was finished around June 1934.

   Fr Sopoćko also told her to write down what was happening: the Diary, six notebooks she wrote in Vilnius and Kraków between 1934 and 1938. From 26 to 28 April 1935, at the close of the Jubilee of the Redemption, the image was shown in public for the first time at the Ostra Brama shrine in Vilnius. On 13–14 September 1935 she was taught the Chaplet of Divine Mercy (Diary, §474–476).

   

   

4. 1936 – 1938

   Kraków: the last months

   From 1936 she lived in Kraków and spent time in the Prądnik hospital with tuberculosis. In October 1937 Jesus taught her about the Hour of Mercy at three in the afternoon (Diary, §1320). The last lines of the Diary were written in June 1938.

   She died on 5 October 1938 in Kraków-Łagiewniki, aged 33, and was buried on 7 October. Her tomb is now in the Shrine of Divine Mercy at Łagiewniki.

   

5. 1959 – 2000

   From a ban to canonisation

   In 1959 the Holy Office forbade the spreading of images and writings promoting the devotion in the form Faustina had received. On 15 April 1978 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith lifted the ban, having obtained many original documents unknown in 1959. Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, had opened the investigation into her life and virtues on 21 October 1965.

   John Paul II beatified her on 18 April 1993 and canonised her on 30 April 2000, the Second Sunday of Easter. That day he declared the Second Sunday of Easter would be called Divine Mercy Sunday throughout the Church. She was the first saint of the new millennium.

Words that remain

These are words Jesus spoke to Faustina, and she wrote down, taken from the Diary. Each passage carries its number so you can read it in full.

English lines from the Diary are short paraphrases, not the published translation.

Legacy