Helen Kowalska was born on August 25, 1905, in Glogowiec, Poland, to Stanislaus and Marianna. Her parents were poor farmers who were strong in their Catholic faith. Helena early on exhibited a deep sense of the presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. One day, the seven-year-old Helena was with her family for Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament at her local church. While the family prayed, Helena experienced Jesus speaking to her personally. He invited her to live a more perfect life.
Helena also experience an overpowering light that sometimes would keep her from sleeping at night. Her parents tried to squelch what they perceived as her overactive imagination, but their attempts to convince her otherwise did not make the lights go away. Once, while working as a maid, Helena experienced her “lights” during the day. It seems to her that the entire courtyard was on fire, and she yelled for help. When the woman of the house came running, ready to put out the fire, there was no fire visible to her.
When she turned seventeen, Helena asked her parents for permission to enter the convent. They were against it, mostly out of concern for the financial burden of paying the dowry that a convent would have required at that time. At first she was obedient to her parents’ wishes, but Jesus continued to speak to her, urging her to go to Warsaw where she would find acceptance in a religious community. Finally, at the age of twenty, she set out for Warsaw.
When she arrived in Warsaw, she found that the religious communities were unwilling to accept her, mainly due to the fact that she offered no dowry or special skill that the nuns could use. Finally the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy agreed to accept her if she would work to pay for the cost of her clothing needed for religious life, her habit. Once she had done this, she entered the community and was given the name Mary Faustina.
Sister Faustina soon found that religious life was not what she had expected. Her days were filled with washing floors and clothes and working in the kitchen (not unlike the tasks she had done working as a maid). After only a few weeks, she began to wonder if she might belong to a place where they prayed more. In the midst of such thoughts, Jesus appeared to Faustina, his face badly bruised and cut. When Faustina asked the Lord who had hurt him so much, he replied she had, by her doubts that this convent wasn’t where he wished her to be.
When Sister Faustina made her vows to the Lord and the community, she was made aware of how much she would suffer. She suffered physically from consumption, or tuberculosis, and asthma. She also suffered mentally with her own doubts and was misunderstood by others in her community. She accepted all these afflictions as a way of participating in the suffering of Jesus.
In 1931, when Sister Faustina was twenty-six, Jesus told her he wished to have an image of himself painted that would convey his great mercy for humankind. Not being gifted as an artist herself, Sister Faustina found this a difficult request to fulfill. In 1934, she finally found an artist who would paint the picture now known as the Divine Mercy.
Faithful to the request of her spiritual director, she recorded all that occurred during her mystical experiences. Her diary details that Jesus wanted her to announce the great love God has for all of his creation. Through Faustina, Jesus spoke of his desire that all would trust in the great mercy of God and abandon themselves to God’s love. The mercy of God, according to Faustina’s writings, is so great that every sin can be forgiven if sinners would only turn to Jesus and abandon themselves to that mercy.
Faustina died at the age of 33 on October 5, 1938. The novena in honor of Divine Mercy is taken from the diary of Sister Faustina as she originally prayed it. Jesus asked that a different group of souls in need of mercy be especially prayed for every day. When one contrasts the shortness and relative obscurity of Sister Faustina’s life with the popularity of this devotion today, one is left in awe of the power of God to use the smallest things to accomplish his designs.
Sister Mary Faustina was canonized by Pope John Paul II, one of her ardent supporters, on April 30, 2000. On the same day, the pope declared that the Second Sunday of Easter would now be known as Divine Mercy Sunday throughout the whole Church. Pope died on the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday five years later.
Dubruiel, Michael. The Church’s Most Powerful Novenas. Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. Copyright (c) 2006. Page 41-45.
Dare to Live in Him 