A mother who cannot read prepares St. Faustina for First Communion

ŚWINICE WARCKIE, Poland, 1914 AD — Saint Faustina Kowalska made her First Holy Communion this year, at nine, in St. Casimir’s, the parish church at Świnice Warckie. Her mother, who could not read, had prepared her for it.

St. Faustina was baptised Helena, and at home she was called Helenka. She was the third child of Stanisław and Marianna Kowalski. The Kowalskis farmed a few acres at Głogowiec, a village in the parish of Świnice Warckie, far from any town or main road. The district was under Russian rule, and there was no school at Świnice Warckie for the children to go to.

The cottage had a single storey, with the farm buildings beside it. Holy pictures hung on the walls, and in the middle of the bedroom stood a small altar with a crucifix and two statues, the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Every night the whole family knelt for evening prayers. In May they sang the Litany of Loreto, a litany in honour of Our Lady, in front of the chapel outside the house, and in October they said the rosary together.

Her father, Stanisław Kowalski, could read. On Sunday afternoons he took the Lives of the Saints down from the bookcase and read it aloud to the family. Early in the morning he sang the Hours, the prayers the Church sets for the times of day, or other hymns. When Marianna Kowalska scolded him for waking the children, he answered that they had to learn from their earliest years that God was the most important.

Marianna Kowalska ran the house and brought up the children. She was a gentle woman. From the time her children were very small, Marianna Kowalska gave them chores in the house and on the farm and held them responsible for getting the work done. She taught them right from wrong.

Marianna Kowalska noticed that her daughter loved to pray and got up in the night to kneel. She tried to stop the girl, warning that a child who kept getting up in the middle of the night would go mad. St. Faustina told her mother: “Mummy, it must be an angel that wakes me up for prayers.”

Once St. Faustina put on her mother’s old clothes, went from house to house as a beggar, and gave the money she collected to the parish priest for the poor. A neighbour, Marianna Berezińska, told Marianna Kowalska: “You have a good, humble and such an innocent child.” Marianna Kowalska said of her daughter: “Everyone loved her - she was chosen, the best of the children. She was modest and quiet, ready to do any chore and help anyone, but at the same time cheerful and always with a smile on her face.”

Out in the pasture, grazing the cattle, St. Faustina passed on the saints’ lives she had learned. She memorised the stories of hermits and missionaries, and the next day she told them word for word to her brothers and sisters and anyone else who was there. Some were about hermits who lived on nothing but roots, berries and forest honey.

Two years before her First Communion, in 1912 AD, St. Faustina was at Vespers, the Church’s evening prayer, in St. Casimir’s. The consecrated Host stood on the altar in a monstrance, the vessel that holds it up for the people to pray before. At that service, when she was seven, St. Faustina knew for the first time, beyond doubt, that God loved her. There too she first felt called to be a nun. She told her brothers and sisters that she would enter a convent when she grew up, and they laughed at her.

This year it was her turn at the altar of St. Casimir’s, where all the Kowalski children made their First Communion. The parish priest gave her Communion. On the way home she walked by herself, apart from the other girls. A friend asked her why she was walking alone. St. Faustina answered: “I’m not alone, I’m walking with Jesus.”