Brief History of the Divine Mercy Message, Devotion and Saint Faustina
MARY FAUSTINA KOWALSKA
1905-1938
Sister Mary Faustina, an apostle
of the Divine Mercy, belongs today to the group of the most popular and
well-known saints of the Church. Through her the Lord Jesus communicates
to the world the great message of God's mercy and reveals the pattern of
Christian perfection based on trust in God and on the attitude of mercy
toward one's neighbors.
She was born on August 25, 1905
in G»ogowiec in Poland of a poor and religious family of peasants, the
third of ten children. She was baptized with the name Helena in the
parish Church of Đwinice Warckie. From a very tender age she stood out
because of her love of prayer, work, obedience, and also her sensitivity
to the poor. At the age of nine she made her first Holy Communion living
this moment very profoundly in her awareness of the presence of the
Divine Guest within her soul. She attended school for three years. At
the age of sixteen she left home and went to work as a housekeeper in
Aleksandrów, şódď and Ostrówek in order to find the means of supporting
herself and of helping her parents.
At the age of seven she had
already felt the first stirrings of a religious vocation. After
finishing school, she wanted to enter the convent but her parents would
not give her permission. Called during a vision of the Suffering Christ,
on August 1, 1925 she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our
Lady of Mercy and took the name Sister Mary Faustina. She lived in the
Congregation for thirteen years and lived in several religious houses.
She spent time at Kraków, P»ock and Vilnius, where she worked as a cook,
gardener and porter.
Externally nothing revealed her
rich mystical interior life. She zealously performed her tasks and
faithfully observed the rule of religious life. She was recollected and
at the same time very natural, serene and full of kindness and
disinterested love for her neighbor. Although her life was apparently
insignificant, monotonous and dull, she hid within herself an
extraordinary union with God.
It is the mystery of the Mercy of
God which she contemplated in the word of God as well as in the everyday
activities of her life that forms the basis of her spirituality. The
process of contemplating and getting to know the mystery of God's mercy
helped develop within Sr. Mary Faustina the attitude of child-like trust
in God as well as mercy toward the neighbors. O my Jesus, each of Your
saints reflects one of Your virtues; I desire to reflect Your
compassionate heart, full of mercy; I want to glorify it. Let Your
mercy, O Jesus, be impressed upon my heart and soul like a seal, and
this will be my badge in this and the future life (Diary 1242). Sister
Faustina was a faithful daughter of the Church which she loved like a
Mother and a Mystic Body of Jesus Christ. Conscious of her role in the
Church, she cooperated with God's mercy in the task of saving lost
souls. At the specific request of and following the example of the Lord
Jesus, she made a sacrifice of her own life for this very goal. In her
spiritual life she also distinguished herself with a love of the
Eucharist and a deep devotion to the Mother of Mercy.
The years she had spent at the
convent were filled with extraordinary gifts, such as: revelations,
visions, hidden stigmata, participation in the Passion of the Lord, the
gift of bilocation, the reading of human souls, the gift of prophecy, or
the rare gift of mystical engagement and marriage. The living
relationship with God, the Blessed Mother, the Angels, the Saints, the
souls in Purgatory — with the entire supernatural world — was as equally
real for her as was the world she perceived with her senses. In spite of
being so richly endowed with extraordinary graces, Sr. Mary Faustina
knew that they do not in fact constitute sanctity. In her Diary she
wrote: Neither graces, nor revelations, nor raptures, nor gifts granted
to a soul make it perfect, but rather the intimate union of the soul
with God. These gifts are merely ornaments of the soul, but constitute
neither its essence nor its perfection. My sanctity and perfection
consist in the close union of my will with the will of God (Diary 1107).
The Lord Jesus chose Sr. Mary
Faustina as the Apostle and "Secretary" of His Mercy, so that she could
tell the world about His great message. In the Old Covenant — He said to
her —I sent prophets wielding thunderbolts to My people. Today I am
sending you with My mercy to the people of the whole world. I do not
want to punish aching mankind, but I desire to heal it, pressing it to
My Merciful Heart (Diary 1588).
The mission of Sister Mary
Faustina consists in 3 tasks:
– reminding the world of the
truth of our faith revealed in the Holy Scripture about the merciful
love of God toward every human being.
– Entreating God's mercy for the
whole world and particularly for sinners, among others through the
practice of new forms of devotion to the Divine Mercy presented by the
Lord Jesus, such as: the veneration of the image of the Divine Mercy
with the inscription: Jesus, I Trust in You, the feast of the Divine
Mercy celebrated on the first Sunday after Easter, chaplet to the Divine
Mercy and prayer at the Hour of Mercy (3 p.m.). The Lord Jesus attached
great promises to the above forms of devotion, provided one entrusted
one's life to God and practiced active love of one's neighbor.
– The third task in Sr. Mary
Faustina's mission consists in initiating the apostolic movement of the
Divine Mercy which undertakes the task of proclaiming and entreating
God's mercy for the world and strives for Christian perfection,
following the precepts laid down by the Blessed Sr. Mary Faustina. The
precepts in question require the faithful to display an attitude of
child-like trust in God which expresses itself in fulfilling His will,
as well as in the attitude of mercy toward one's neighbors. Today, this
movement within the Church involves millions of people throughout the
world; it comprises religious congregations, lay institutes, religious,
brotherhoods, associations, various communities of apostles of the
Divine Mercy, as well as individual people who take up the tasks which
the Lord Jesus communicated to them through Sr. Mary Faustina.
The mission of the Blessed Sr.
Mary Faustina was recorded in her Diary which she kept at the specific
request of the Lord Jesus and her confessors. In it, she recorded
faithfully all of the Lord Jesus' wishes and also described the
encounters between her soul and Him. Secretary of My most profound
mystery — the Lord Jesus said toSr. Faustina — know that your task is to
write down everything that I make known to you about My mercy, for the
benefit of those who by reading these things will be comforted in their
souls and will have the courage to approach Me (Diary 1693). In an
extraordinary way, Sr. Mary Faustina's work sheds light on the mystery
of the Divine Mercy. It delights not only the simple and uneducated
people, but also scholars who look upon it as an additional source of
theo-logical research. The Diary has been translated into many
languages, among others, English, German, Italian, Spanish, French,
Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak.
Sister Mary Faustina, consumed by
tuberculosis and by innumerable sufferings which she accepted as a
voluntary sacrifice for sinners, died in Krakow at the age of just
thirty three on October 5, 1938 with a reputation for spiritual maturity
and a mystical union with God. The reputation of the holiness of her
life grew as did the cult to the Divine Mercy and the graces she
obtained from God through her intercession. In the years 1965-67, the
investigative Process into her life and heroic virtues was undertaken in
Krakow and in the year 1968, the Beatification Process was initiated in
Rome. The latter came to an end in December 1992. On April 18, 1993 our
Holy Father John Paul II raised Sister Faustina to the glory of the
altars. Sr. Mary Faustina's remains rest at the Sanctuary of the Divine
Mercy in Kraków-şagiewniki.
Click on the Below Image to Hear a sample of the
Chaplet of Divine Mercy in Song Prayer
"Anyone who says it will receive great Mercy at the hour of death. Priests will recommend it to sinners as the last hope. Even the most hardened sinner, if he recites this Chaplet even once, will receive grace from My Infinite Mercy. I want the whole world to know My Infinite Mercy. I want to give unimaginable graces to those who trust in My Mercy...."
MARY FAUSTINA KOWALSKA
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