A Short Biography of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska

Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, known today the world over as the “Apostle of the Divine Mercy,” is numbered by theologians among the outstanding mystics of the Church. She was the third of ten children born into a poor and pious peasant family in Glogowiec, a village in the heart of Poland. At her baptism in the nearby Parish Church of Swinice Warckie she was given the name “Helena.” From childhood she distinguished herself by her piety, love of prayer, industriousness and obedience as well as by her great sensitivity to human misery. She had hardly three years of schooling, and at the age of fourteen she left the family hearth to help her parents and to earn her own livelihood serving as a domestic in the nearby cities of Aleksandrów and Lódz.

When she was only seven (two years before her First Holy Communion), Helen already sensed in her soul the call to embrace the religious life. When later she made her desire known to her parents, they categorically did not acquiesce in her entering a convent. Because of this situation Helen strove to stifle this divine call within her. Pressed on, however, by a vision of the suffering Christ and by the words of His reproach: “How long shall I put up with you and how long will you keep putting Me off?” (Diary, 9), she began to search for a convent to join. She knocked on many a convent door, but nowhere was she accepted. Finally on August 1, 1925, Helen crossed the threshold of the cloister in the convent of the Congregation of Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy on Zytnia Street in Warsaw. In her Diary she declared: “It seemed to me that I had stepped into the life of Paradise. A single prayer was bursting forth from my heart, one of thanksgiving” (Diary, 17).

Upon her entrance to the Congregation Helen received the name Sr. Maria Faustina. Her novitiate she spent in Cracow, and there she pronounced her first religious vows, and five years later, she made her perpetual profession of the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. She was assigned to work in a number of the Congregation’s houses, but for a longer period in those of Cracow, Plock and Vilnius, fulfilling the duties of cook, gardener and door-keeper. To all external appearances nothing betrayed her extraordinarily rich mystical life. She zealously went about her duties, she faithfully observed all the religious rules, she was recollected and kept silent, all the while being natural, cheerful, full of kindness and of unselfish love of neighbour. Her entire life was concentrated on constant striving for an even fuller union with God and on self-sacrificing cooperation with Jesus in the work of saving souls. “My Jesus” – she avowed in her Diary - “You know that from my earliest years I have wanted to become a great saint; that is to say, I have wanted to love You with a love so great that there would be no soul who has hitherto loved You so” (Diary, 1372). It is her Diary that reveals to us the depths of her spiritual life. An attentive reading of these records offers a picture of the high degree of her soul’s union with God – the great extent of God’s company keeping with her soul, as well as her efforts and struggles on the way to Christian perfection. The Lord endowed her with great graces – with the gift of contemplation, with a deep knowledge of the mystery of the mercy of God, with visions, revelations, the hidden stigmata, with the gift of prophecy and of reading into human souls, and also with the rare gift of mystical espousals. As lavishly gifted as she was, this is what 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. …….My sanctity and perfection is based upon the close union of my will with the will of God” (Diary, 1107).

The austere lifestyle and exhausting fasts that she imposed upon herself even before joining the Congregation, weakened her organism to such an extent that already during her postulancy it became necessary to send her to Skolimów near Warsaw to restore her to health. Towards the end of her first year of novitiate, she was visited by unusually painful mystical experiences of the so-called dark night, and later by the spiritual and moral sufferings related to the accomplishment of the mission she was receiving from Christ the Lord. Sr. Faustina laid down her life in sacrifice for sinners and on this account she also sustained diverse sufferings, in order by means of them to come to the aid of their souls. During the last years of her life, inner sufferings of the so-called “passive night” of the soul and bodily diseases grew in intensity. The spreading tuberculosis attacked her lungs and alimentary canal. For this reason, twice she underwent several months’ treatment in the hospital on Pradnik Street in Cracow.

Physically ravaged, but fully mature spiritually, she died in the odour of sanctity, mystically united with God, on October 5, 1938, hardly 33 years old, having been a religious for 13 years. Her mortal remains were laid to rest in the common tomb in the convent’s cemetery in Cracow- Lagiewniki. In 1966, during the informative process towards Sister Faustina’s beatification, they were transferred to the convent chapel.

To this simple, uneducated, but courageous woman religious, who trusted Him without limit, Our Lord Jesus consigned the great mission to proclaim His message of mercy directed to the whole world: “Today,” He told her, “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). You are the secretary of My mercy; I have chosen you for that office in this and the next life” (Diary, 1605) …… “to make known to souls the great mercy that I have for them, and to exhort them to trust in the bottomless depth of My mercy” (Diary, 1567).