Saint Faustina Kowalska

St. Faustina was born on August 25, 1905 AD at Głogowiec, near Łódź, to Marianna and Stanisław Kowalski. Her mother could not read, and it was she who taught the children the faith and prepared them for their First Holy Communion. St. Faustina made hers at nine, in the parish church at Świnice Warckie.

She began school at twelve, when the Russian occupation ended and a primary school opened, and left after three years to make room for the younger children. At sixteen she said goodbye to her parents and went into domestic service at Aleksandrów Łódzki, to help keep the family. She came home the next year to say she wanted to enter a convent, and her parents refused, giving as their reason that they could not afford a dowry.

At a dance in Wenecja Park in Łódź she saw Jesus beside her, crushed with suffering, stripped of His apparel and covered with wounds. She left the dance for the cathedral of St. Stanisław Kostka, lay prostrate before the Blessed Sacrament, and was told to go at once to Warsaw and enter a convent.

She left for the capital in July 1924 AD with nothing arranged beforehand. Mother Michaela Moraczewska accepted her provisionally at the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, on condition that she first earn what her habit would cost. She took a post with Aldona Lipszyc at Ostrówek, made a vow of perpetual chastity there during Vespers, and crossed the convent threshold on Żytnia Street on August 1, 1925 AD.

At the clothing at Kraków on April 30, 1926 AD she received the habit and the name Sister Maria Faustyna, and fainted twice during the rite. Towards the end of her first year in the novitiate her prayer went dark, and she found no consolation in it. Bishop Stanisław Rospond received her first vows at Łagiewniki on April 30, 1928 AD, with her parents there to watch.

She was moved often between the Congregation's houses and worked as cook, gardener and portress. At Płock her main occupation was serving customers in the bakery shop.

On the evening of Sunday, February 22, 1931 AD, in her cell at Płock, St. Faustina saw the Lord Jesus in a white robe, with two rays coming from His breast. She was asked for an image painted after the pattern she saw, and for a Feast of Divine Mercy on the first Sunday after Easter.

She could not draw at all. Her confessor took the command to mean an image painted in her soul, and a sister she asked for help offered her a choice of holy pictures instead. In the house her silence under questioning annoyed the more curious sisters.

She made her perpetual vows at Kraków on May 1, 1933 AD and was sent to Vilnius at the end of that month. In June she met Father Michał Sopoćko, who lectured in pastoral theology at Stefan Batory University and became her confessor. He ordered her to write down what she received, and looked for an artist who could paint what she described.

Eugeniusz Kazimirowski began the painting in January 1934 AD, with Father Sopoćko posing for the figure of Jesus, and she came to the studio once or twice a week to direct him. When it was finished in June she wept, because the Jesus of the picture was not as beautiful as the one she had seen. From April 26 to 28, 1935 AD the image hung in the Gate of Dawn for the close of the Jubilee Year of the Redemption, decorated with greenery and flowers by her own hands.

On September 13, 1935 AD, in her cell at Vilnius, she saw an angel sent by God to punish the earth, and the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy was given her then. She left Vilnius on March 21, 1936 AD, already ill, believing that she was to found a contemplative order. Father Józef Andrasz, who became her confessor at Kraków in May, held that a congregation to preach and obtain God's mercy was necessary for the Church, while Father Sopoćko advised her by letter and was more cautious.

On May 4, 1937 AD Mother General Michaela Moraczewska told her that she had always held her back, but that the decision to go or to stay was now entirely her own. A great darkness came over her the next day, and she put off what she had decided to do. In June she wrote down the final shape of the work, one work in three hues, and she stayed in her own Congregation.

Tuberculosis, undiagnosed until her years in Vilnius, had attacked both her lungs and her alimentary canal, and she spent over eight months in the hospital at Prądnik. Her superiors sent her back there after Easter in 1938 AD, and she made her last entries in the notebook at the end of June. She came back to the convent infirmary on September 17, 1938 AD and asked pardon of the sisters for her unintentional failings.

She did not let the sisters who visited come too close, because she did not want them infected, and she asked her family not to travel because of the cost. On the afternoon of October 5, 1938 AD Father Andrasz gave her absolution and the Sacrament of the Sick. She died at a quarter to eleven that night, aged thirty-three, with Sister Amelia Socha and Sister Eufemia Traczyńska beside her.

The sisters carried her coffin to the cemetery at the end of the garden on October 7, 1938 AD, and no one from her family was there, because she had not wanted to put them to the cost of the journey. Pilgrims came to the grave to pray for her intercession, and on March 7, 1943 AD Father Andrasz blessed Adolf Hyła's painting of the Merciful Jesus and began public devotions at Łagiewniki. On March 6, 1959 AD the Holy See banned the spread of the devotion in the forms she had conveyed, and the prohibition stood for nineteen years.

Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, who as a young labourer at the Solvay quarry beside the convent had prayed before the image, opened her cause at Kraków in 1965 AD, and the bans were lifted on April 15, 1978 AD. As Pope John Paul II he beatified her in 1993 AD, canonized her on April 30, 2000 AD, and gave the Second Sunday of Easter the name Divine Mercy Sunday for the whole Church. Pope Francis entered her memorial in the General Roman Calendar on May 18, 2020 AD, to be kept on October 5.