Today, October 5, is the memorial of Saint Faustina Kowalska.
The Apostle of Divine Mercy.
Faustina was the third of 10 siblings and managed to attend only three years of schooling. When she was a teenager, she became a housemaid. Initially rejected by religious congregations, she eventually joined the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw, Poland in 1925. In her assignments, Faustina served as cook, gardener, and doorkeeper.
Her deep interior life was fuelled by her devotion to the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the sacraments. She started having mystical experiences: visions, revelations, and the hidden stigmata. All these she wrote in her diary. As she was practically illiterate, she wrote phonetically, without quotation marks. The diary ran for almost 700 pages.
Unfortunately, a bad translation of her diary got to Rome in 1958 that it was declared heretical. When Karol Wojtyla (the future Pope John Paul II) became Archbishop of Krakow, requests for reconsideration flooded his office. He required a better translation, and the Vatican officials discovered that it was not heresy at all: the diary was all about God’s love and mercy. It is now known as “Divine Mercy In My Soul.”
In the 1930‘s, Sister Faustina received instructions from Jesus that she was to spread throughout the world a message of God‘s mercy. Jesus requested that a picture be painted of Him with these words: “Jesus, I Trust in You.” She was asked to be a model of mercy to others, to live her entire life, in imitation of Christ’s, as a sacrifice. She commissioned the painting in 1935, with a red and a white light shining from Christ’s Sacred Heart. In the course of her life, she was prominently guided by her spiritual director Blessed Michael Sopocko.
Faustina died in 1938 at age 33 of what was thought to be tuberculosis. Pope St. John Paul II beatified her in 1993 and canonized her in 2000.