Saint Faustina Kowalska

Helena Kowalska was born in 1905 to a poor Polish farming family. From childhood she dreamed of becoming a nun, but her family opposed it. At twenty, at a dance, she had a vision of the suffering Christ, who asked her, 'How long shall I put up with you, and how long will you keep putting me off?' She left that very week for Warsaw, eventually entering the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy as a cook and gardener. She took the name Maria Faustina. Beginning in 1931, Jesus began appearing to her in visions. He asked her to have an image painted of Himself as 'Divine Mercy' — pale rays streaming from His heart, one red (blood) and one pale (water) — with the inscription 'Jesus, I trust in You.' He entrusted to her the Chaplet of Divine Mercy (prayed on rosary beads) and asked that the Sunday after Easter be established as Divine Mercy Sunday. He told her: 'Humanity will not find peace until it turns with trust to my mercy.' She recorded the revelations in a diary of over 700 pages — now known as the Diary of St. Faustina, one of the most important mystical documents of the 20th century. She suffered terribly, both from tuberculosis and from being misunderstood by her superiors, who sometimes thought her visions were imaginary. She died in 1938 at age 33. Her writings were suppressed for years due to translation errors. Pope John Paul II, a fellow Pole, spent much of his priestly life promoting her message. He canonized her in 2000, established Divine Mercy Sunday for the universal Church the same year, and died on the vigil of Divine Mercy Sunday in 2005.