St. Faustina's confessor visits her at Łagiewniki, and she does not talk

KRAKÓW-ŁAGIEWNIKI, Poland, September 26, 1938 AD — Blessed Michał Sopoćko, the Vilnius priest who had the first image of the Merciful Jesus painted, came to the convent infirmary at Łagiewniki today to see Saint Faustina Kowalska, and she did not talk with him. He had guided her since 1933 and had carried her requests to a painter, to the public and to the Church.

St. Faustina is thirty-three, a sister of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, and she has tuberculosis of the lungs and the digestive tract. She had recorded that Jesus asked for an image of Him painted as she had seen Him, and for a Feast of Divine Mercy kept on the first Sunday after Easter. In 1935 AD she told Father Sopoćko that God also wanted a new congregation, to preach Divine Mercy to the world and to pray for mercy on it. Neither was done yet: the Church had not established the feast, and the congregation did not exist.

Father Sopoćko met her in Vilnius in June 1933 AD, when he was hearing confessions at her convent. St. Faustina wrote in her diary that she recognised him as a priest she had seen in a vision, and heard in her soul: “This is My faithful servant; he will help you carry out My will here on Earth.” Father Sopoćko was slow to believe her, and said later: “More out of curiosity rather than conviction as to the authenticity of Sister Faustina’s visions, I decided to have the picture painted.”

The painter was Eugeniusz Kazimirowski, who had a studio in the building where Father Sopoćko lived. Through the first half of 1934 AD St. Faustina went to the studio once or twice a week to tell the painter how Jesus looked, and Father Sopoćko posed for the figure of Jesus. When the picture was finished she cried, because the Jesus in it was not as beautiful as the one she had seen. In April 1935 AD Father Sopoćko had the image hung for three days at the Gates of Dawn, the city’s shrine of Our Lady, and the public saw it for the first time.

St. Faustina moved to her congregation’s convent in Kraków in the spring of 1936 AD. After that Father Sopoćko advised her by letter and visited her on his trips to Kraków.

After Easter this year her superiors sent St. Faustina back to the city hospital at Prądnik. A nursing sister told her she was too exhausted to receive Holy Communion. St. Faustina wrote in her diary that a Seraph then came to her bed and brought her Holy Communion for thirteen days.

A few weeks ago Father Sopoćko came to Kraków and visited her at Prądnik several times. St. Faustina told him that his main task was to have the Church establish the Feast of the Divine Mercy. He should not worry too much about the new congregation, she said, because there would be signs to show him what to do. She told him she would soon die, and that she had finished writing down and handing on everything she had been asked to.

Father Sopoćko said goodbye and left her room. On the way out he remembered that he had not given her the booklets of prayers to the Divine Mercy, and he turned back. When he opened her door, St. Faustina was raised in the air above her bed, absorbed in prayer. Father Sopoćko wrote: “Her eyes were fixed on an invisible object, and her pupils slightly dilated, for some time she did not take any notice of me, and I did not want to disturb her and was intending to leave, but soon she came round, noticed me and apologised for not hearing me knock or enter.” He gave her the prayers and said goodbye a second time, and St. Faustina said to him: “See you in heaven.”

On September 17 she left the hospital and came back to the convent infirmary at Łagiewniki. She kept the sisters who came to see her back from her bed, because she did not want them to catch tuberculosis.

Father Sopoćko came to her there today. He wrote of the visit: “The last time I visited her, on 26 September in the Łagiewniki Convent, she did not want to talk to me, or perhaps she couldn’t any longer, saying she was in communion with the Heavenly Father.” The one sentence St. Faustina gave him was: “My one occupation is to live in the presence of my Heavenly Father.” Father Sopoćko went on: “Indeed she gave the impression of a supernatural being. I no longer had any doubts that what she wrote in her diary about Holy Communion being administered to her in hospital by an angel was absolutely true.”

After their last meeting Father Sopoćko wrote down what he felt: “I felt great pain in my soul and I was embittered because I had to say goodbye to this unusual creature and because I felt so abandoned by everybody. However, I understood that, first of all, I had to trust the Divine Mercy especially. (…) That’s why I had to stop being small-minded and I was to trust, trust and once again trust Him.”