Saint Faustina Kowalska

Helena Kowalska was born on 25 August 1905 in the village of Głogowiec in Poland, the third of ten children of a poor farming family. She had less than three years of schooling. At sixteen she left home to work as a housemaid to help her parents.

In 1924, at a dance in Łódź, she saw Jesus beside her, suffering, who asked her, “How long shall I put up with you and how long will you keep putting me off?” She went straight to the cathedral, and then to Warsaw to find a convent that would take her. After many refusals she was accepted in 1925 by the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, and she took the name Sister Maria Faustina. In the convent she worked as a cook, a gardener and a portress.

Behind this ordinary life, Jesus spoke to her often. In 1931 he asked her to have an image painted of him as she saw him, with rays of red and pale light streaming from his heart, and the words Jesus, I trust in you. In Vilnius her confessor, Blessed Michał Sopoćko, had the first image painted in 1934. At his direction she recorded her experiences in a diary, published as Divine Mercy in My Soul. Through her Jesus asked for a feast of Divine Mercy on the Sunday after Easter, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and prayer at three in the afternoon, the hour of his death.

She suffered greatly from tuberculosis and died in Kraków on 5 October 1938, at thirty-three. Pope John Paul II, himself from Kraków, canonized her on 30 April 2000, the first saint of the new millennium. On the same day he established Divine Mercy Sunday for the whole Church.