St. Faustina

St. Faustina was born Helena Kowalska on August 25, 1905, in the village of Głogowiec in central Poland, the third of ten children of a poor and devout farming family. She had less than three years of schooling and worked from her early teens as a domestic servant. Drawn to religious life from childhood, she was refused by several convents before the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw accepted her in 1925. She received the habit and the name Sister Maria Faustina, and spent her thirteen years of religious life in the humblest of duties—cook, gardener, and doorkeeper—in the congregation's houses in Warsaw, Płock, Vilnius, and Kraków. Behind this hidden exterior lay an extraordinary interior life. Beginning especially in 1931, Faustina reported visions of the merciful Jesus, who she said asked her to have an image painted with the inscription 'Jesus, I trust in You,' to pray and promote the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and to work for the establishment of a feast of Divine Mercy on the Sunday after Easter. At the direction of her confessor, Blessed Michael Sopoćko, and her superiors, she recorded her experiences in a diary, published after her death as 'Divine Mercy in My Soul,' which has become one of the most widely read spiritual works of the twentieth century. Faustina's message was a simple and urgent one: that God's mercy is greater than any sin, and that souls are called to trust in Jesus and to show mercy to others in deed, word, and prayer. She bore illness and interior trials with quiet fidelity, offering her sufferings for sinners. Afflicted with tuberculosis, she died in Kraków on October 5, 1938, at the age of thirty-three. Devotion to the Divine Mercy spread worldwide in the decades after her death, championed above all by her countryman Karol Wojtyła. As Pope John Paul II he beatified Faustina in 1993 and canonized her on April 30, 2000—the first canonization of the Great Jubilee year—establishing on the same day the feast of Divine Mercy Sunday for the universal Church. Her relics rest in the Basilica of Divine Mercy at Kraków-Łagiewniki, one of the great pilgrimage shrines of modern Catholicism. Her feast is October 5.