St. Maria Faustina Kowalska

Their story

Helena Kowalska was born in 1905 in the Polish village of Głogowiec, the third of ten children in a poor farming family. She had less than three years of schooling and went to work as a housekeeper as a teenager. One evening at a dance, she saw a vision of the suffering Jesus asking how long she would make him wait. Soon after, she went to Warsaw and was accepted by the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, taking the name Sister Maria Faustina. In the convent, Faustina worked as a cook, gardener and doorkeeper. Behind these humble tasks was an extraordinary inner life. Beginning in 1931, Jesus appeared to her and asked her to spread devotion to his Divine Mercy. He asked that an image be painted of him with rays of red and pale light streaming from his heart, signed with the words, “Jesus, I trust in You.” Through her, he also gave the Church the Chaplet of Divine Mercy and asked for a feast of Mercy on the Sunday after Easter. At the request of her confessor, she recorded these conversations in her diary, Divine Mercy in My Soul. Faustina died of tuberculosis in Kraków in 1938, at the age of thirty-three. Pope St. John Paul II canonized her in 2000 and established Divine Mercy Sunday for the whole Church.