Helena Kowalska was born in Głogowiec, central Poland, in 1905, the third of 10 children in a peasant family which was poor and devout. When she attended Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament aged seven, she felt a religious calling. She wanted to enter a convent at 16 but her parents would not let her and she went to work as a housekeeper instead to support the family.
In 1924, when she was 19, she attended a dance with her sister, during which she saw an image of the suffering Jesus. She said that Jesus later instructed her to go to Warsaw and join a convent.
She obeyed and, without anyone’s knowledge, left for Warsaw the next day. She tried many convents but was turned away from most because of her impoverished-looking clothes. After several weeks of searching she was accepted into the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy.
In 1926, aged 20, she received her habit and took the religious name of Sister Maria Faustina of the Blessed Sacrament.
Mercy mission
Throughout her life Sister Faustina saw visions of Jesus. After she was moved to a convent in Płock in 1930 she said that Jesus appeared to her as the “King of Divine Mercy”, and told her to paint an image of Him accompanied by the words, “Jesus, I trust in you”. She was not a gifted painter but she found a willing artist.
She also recorded in her diary that Christ had told her he wanted the Divine Mercy image to be “solemnly blessed on the first Sunday after Easter; that Sunday is to be the Feast of Mercy”.
This image inspired the growth of the Divine Mercy Devotion, though she did not live to see its worldwide spread, dying in 1938 in Kraków.
First saint of the century
By 1951 there were 150 Divine Mercy centres in Poland. In 1956 Pope Pius XII blessed an image of the devotion in Rome.
Sister Faustina was beatified in April 1993 and canonised by Pope John Paul II in April 2000, becoming the first saint of the new millennium. She is known as the Apostle of the Divine Mercy.
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