St. Faustina (1905-1938) was born Helena Kowalska in Poland to a poor family with ten children. They were devoutly Catholic, and she felt a call to the religious life at age seven, when praying in front of the exposed Eucharist. Despite wanting to become a sister as soon as she finished her schooling, she was sent to work as a housekeeper to help support the family instead.
 
When she was 18, she had a vision of Jesus suffering and, in the vision, Jesus asked her how long she would keep putting off entering religious life. She decided, at that moment, to travel to Warsaw and join the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. Upon entering the Congregation, she took the name Sister Maria Faustina.
 
During her 13 years in the Congregation, Sister Faustina experienced and recorded extraordinary revelations from Jesus. She recorded these experiences and messages into notebooks which became later known as the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska. In these writings, she reveals Jesus asking her to proclaim God’s loving message of Divine Mercy.
 
Alongside her writings, Sister Faustina also experienced many miraculous phenomena. There are stories of her experiencing hidden stigmata, bilocation, prophecy, and the ability to read into human souls. Despite these occurrences, she maintained that miraculous events were simply “ornaments” for the soul and that her real sanctity came from her deep relationship with Jesus and desire to do God’s will.
 
After her death at age 33, her writings on Divine Mercy sparked a great movement in the worldwide Catholic church with a strong focus on the Mercy of Christ and how to extend that mercy to others. Saint Pope John Paul II called her “the great apostle of Divine Mercy in our time.” St. Faustina, pray for us!