Saint Faustina Kowalska

Virgin

Feast Day

October 5

Life

1905–1938

Canonized

2000

Order

Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy

Born

Głogowiec, Poland

Helena Kowalska was born on 25 August 1905 at Głogowiec in central Poland, the third of ten children of a poor peasant family. After a childhood marked by piety and poverty, she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy at Warsaw on 1 August 1925, taking the name Sister Maria Faustina of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Over thirteen years she served chiefly in the convent kitchens, gardens and gates at houses in Kraków, Płock and Vilnius.

From February 1931 she received what she described as private revelations of Jesus as Divine Mercy. At Płock on 22 February 1931, in the words of her Diary, she beheld the Lord clothed in a white garment with two rays issuing from the region of his Heart, one red and one pale. He instructed her to have an image painted with the inscription Jesus, I trust in You (Jezu, ufam Tobie). Subsequent revelations included the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, the Hour of Mercy at three in the afternoon, and the request for a Feast of Mercy on the Sunday after Easter.

On the direction of her confessor, Blessed Father Michael Sopocko, she committed her experiences to a Diary written between 1934 and 1938. She died of advanced tuberculosis at the convent in Kraków-Łagiewniki on 5 October 1938 at the age of thirty-three. Pope Saint John Paul II beatified her on 18 April 1993 and canonized her on 30 April 2000. On the same day, the Second Sunday of Easter, he established that day as Divine Mercy Sunday for the universal Church. Her Optional Memorial was inserted in the General Roman Calendar by decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship on 18 May 2020.