Faustina Kowalska

Helena Kowalska was born on August 25, 1905, in Głogowiec, a small village in central Poland, the third of ten children in a poor farming family. She felt drawn to religious life from childhood but her family could not afford the dowry required by most convents. She spent several years working as a domestic servant to save the money herself. In 1925 she was accepted by the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw and took the name Sister Maria Faustina. She spent the following years working in the congregation's houses as a cook, gardener, and doorkeeper — quiet, often unnoticed, behind the institutional surfaces of convent life.

On the night of February 22, 1931, in her cell at the convent in Płock, she saw Jesus standing before her clothed in white, with two rays of light — one red, one white — emanating from his heart. He instructed her to have an image painted of this vision, bearing the words "Jesus, I trust in You," and asked for the establishment of a feast of Divine Mercy on the Sunday after Easter. Over the following seven years, across convents in Płock, Vilnius, and Kraków, she continued to receive visions, locutions, and interior communications. She recorded all of it in a diary that eventually ran to more than six hundred pages.

She received the Chaplet of Divine Mercy — a prayer sequence to be said on rosary beads — in Vilnius in 1935. She was frequently ill with tuberculosis. She died on October 5, 1938, in Kraków, at the age of thirty-three. After her death, her diary circulated among Polish Catholics but came under ecclesiastical suspicion; in 1959 it was placed on a restricted list over concerns about translation errors and theological ambiguities. Polish bishops undertook a full review of the original Polish text, cleared it of the concerns, and the restrictions were lifted. Pope John Paul II — a Pole who had known of Faustina's spirituality since his years as a priest in Kraków — became the principal champion of her cause. She was beatified on April 18, 1993, and canonized on April 30, 2000. At the canonization, John Paul II established Divine Mercy Sunday as a feast of the universal Church — the first Sunday after Easter.