Maria Faustyna Kowalska of the Blessed Sacrament, OLM (born Helena Kowalska; 25 August 1905 – 5 October 1938) was a Polish Catholic religious sister and mystic. Faustyna, popularly spelled Faustina in English, had apparitions of Jesus Christ which inspired the Catholic devotion to the Divine Mercy, therefore she is sometimes called the "secretary" of Divine Mercy.
Throughout her life, Kowalska reported having visions of Jesus and conversations with him, which she noted in her diary, later published as The Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy in My Soul. Her biography, submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, quoted some of the conversations with Jesus regarding the Divine Mercy devotion.
At the age of 20 years, she joined a convent in Warsaw. She was later transferred to Płock and then to Vilnius, where she met Father Michał Sopoćko, who was to be her confessor and spiritual director, and who supported her devotion to the Divine Mercy. With this priest's help, Kowalska commissioned an artist to paint the first Divine Mercy image, based on her vision of Jesus. Father Sopoćko celebrated Mass in the presence of this painting on Low Sunday, also known as the Second Sunday of Easter or (as established by Pope John Paul II), Divine Mercy Sunday.
The Catholic Church canonized Kowalska as a saint on 30 April 2000. The mystic is classified in the liturgy as a virgin and is venerated within the church as the "Apostle of Divine Mercy". Her tomb is in the Divine Mercy Sanctuary, Kraków, where she spent the end of her life and met confessor Józef Andrasz, who also supported the message of mercy.
She was born Helena Kowalska on 25 August 1905 in Głogowiec, Łęczyca County, northwest of Łódź, in Poland. She was the third of ten children of Stanisław Kowalski and Marianna Kowalska. Her father was a carpenter and a peasant, and the family was poor and religious.
She later stated that she first felt a calling to the religious life while she attended the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament at the age of seven. She wanted to enter the convent after she had completed her time at school, but her parents would not give her permission. When she was 16, she went to work as a housekeeper, first in Aleksandrów Łódzki, where she received the Sacrament of Confirmation, then in Łódź, to support herself and to help her parents.
In 1924, at the age of 18 and a half, Kowalska went with her sister Natalia to a dance in a park in Łódź. Kowalska said that at the dance, she had a vision of a suffering Jesus, who she believed asked her: 'How long shall I put up with you and how long will you keep putting Me off?" She then went to the Łódź Cathedral, where, as she later said, Jesus instructed her to depart for Warsaw immediately and to enter a convent. She took a train for Warsaw, some 85 miles (137 km) away, without asking her parents' permission and despite the fact that she knew nobody in Warsaw. The only belongings she took were the dress that she was wearing.
In 1925, Kowalska worked as a housemaid to save the money she needed, making deposits at the convent throughout the year and was finally accepted, as the Mother Superior had promised. On 30 April 1926, at the age of 20 years, she was clothed in the habit and received the religious name Maria Faustina of the Blessed Sacrament. Richard Torretto sees it as the feminine form of the name of a Roman martyr Faustinus, who was killed in AD 120. In April 1928, having completed the novitiate, she took her first religious vows as a nun, with her parents attending the rite.
From February to April 1929, she was posted to the convent in Vilnius, then in Poland, and now the capital of Lithuania, where she served as a cook. Although her first posting to Vilnius was short, she returned there later and met the priest Michael Sopoćko, who supported her mission. A year after her first return from Vilnius, in May 1930, she was transferred to the convent in Płock, Poland, for almost two years.
Kowalska arrived in Płock in May 1930. That year, the first signs of her illness, which was later thought to be tuberculosis, appeared, and she was sent to rest for several months in a nearby farm owned by her congregation. After her recovery, she returned to the convent, and by February 1931, she had been in the Płock area for about nine months.
Kowalska wrote that on the night of Sunday, 22 February 1931, while she was in her cell in Płock, Jesus appeared wearing a white garment with red and pale rays emanating from his heart. In her diary (Notebook I, Items 47 and 48), she wrote that Jesus told her:
Paint an image according to the pattern you see, with the signature: "Jesus, I trust in You" (in Polish: "Jezu, ufam Tobie"). I desire that this image be venerated, first in your chapel, and then throughout the world. I promise that the soul that will venerate this image will not perish.
Not knowing how to paint, Kowalska approached some other nuns at the convent in Płock for help, but she received no assistance. Three years later, after her assignment to Vilnius, the first artistic rendering of the image was produced under her direction.
In the same 22 February 1931 message about the Divine Mercy image, as Kowalska also wrote in her diary (Notebook I, item 49), Jesus told her that he wanted the Divine Mercy image to be "solemnly blessed on the first Sunday after Easter Sunday; that Sunday is to be the Feast of Mercy."
In November 1932, Kowalska returned to Warsaw to prepare to take her final vows as a nun, by which she would become in perpetuity a sister of Our Lady of Mercy. The ceremony took place on 1 May 1933, in Łagiewniki.
In late May 1933, Kowalska was transferred to Vilnius to work as the gardener; her tasks included growing vegetables. She remained in Vilnius for about three years, until March 1936. The convent in Vilnius then had only 18 sisters and was housed in a few scattered small houses, rather than a large building.
Shortly after arriving in Vilnius, Kowalska met the priest Michael Sopoćko, the newly appointed confessor to the nuns. He was also a professor of pastoral theology at Stefan Batory University, now called Vilnius University.
When Kowalska went for the first time to this priest for confession, she told him that she had been conversing with Jesus, who had a plan for her. After some time, Sopoćko insisted on a complete psychiatric evaluation of Kowalska by Helena Maciejewska, a psychiatrist and a physician associated with the convent. This took place in 1933 and Kowalska passed the required tests and was declared of sound mind.