Divine Mercy

Helena Kowalska was born on August 25, 1905, in the village of Głogowiec, in what was then Russian-occupied Poland. She was the third of ten children born to Marianna and Stanisław Kowalski, a poor peasant family of deep faith. From childhood, Helena felt a persistent interior call to religious life, a longing she could not silence even as the family’s poverty made entrance into a convent seem impossible.

After several years of working as a domestic servant to save money for a required dowry, Helena was accepted by the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw in 1925. She was twenty years old. Upon entering, she received the religious name Sister Maria Faustina of the Blessed Sacrament. The congregation’s apostolate was the rehabilitation of troubled women and girls — a fitting setting for someone who would become the messenger of God’s mercy to the world.

Faustina lived an outwardly unremarkable religious life — obedient, humble, assigned to kitchen and garden work in the congregation’s houses in Warsaw, Vilnius, and Kraków. Her interior life, however, was extraordinary: a life of mystical visions, locutions, and an intense consciousness of the suffering of Christ and the desperate need of sinners for mercy.

On the evening of February 22, 1931, in Płock, Poland, Faustina received the vision that would define her entire mission. Christ appeared to her clothed in a white garment, with two rays of light streaming from his heart — one red, one white (pale). He spoke directly to her:

This vision established Faustina’s central mission: to be the instrument through which God would reveal His mercy to the world in a new and urgent way. The requests were specific and concrete: an image to be painted, a feast to be established, a chaplet to be prayed, and a message to be spread. Faustina began recording these visions and interior locutions in a spiritual diary at the direction of her confessor.

Faustina continued to receive visions and locutions throughout the remainder of her short life. She recorded them in six notebooks totaling approximately 600 pages, known collectively as the Diary of St. Faustina or Divine Mercy in My Soul. The Diary records not only the visions but Faustina’s prayers, interior struggles, and her deep sense of unworthiness alongside an unshakeable trust in God’s mercy.

In Vilnius in 1933, Faustina was assigned Fr. Michał Sopoćko as her spiritual director. He was initially skeptical — a trained theologian and professor at the Stefan Batory University, not easily moved by claims of private revelation. After careful examination of Faustina’s visions and spiritual state, he came to believe her experiences were genuine and began to support her mission actively.

At Fr. Sopoćko’s initiative, the first painting of the Divine Mercy image was commissioned from artist Eugeniusz Kazimirowski in 1934 in Vilnius. This painting, executed under Faustina’s guidance and with her corrections, is considered the closest to her description of the original vision. Fr. Sopoćko also published the first theological articles on the Divine Mercy devotion and worked tirelessly to obtain ecclesiastical approval.