Faustina and the Two Rays

I chose an uneducated farm girl from Głogowiec, the third of ten children, who left school after barely three years to work as a servant, and I gave her something that would eventually be studied by theologians on every continent. This is how I most often prefer to work — not through the credentialed, but through the emptied, because Helena Kowalska, who took the name Faustina when she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw in 1925, had almost nothing to get in the way of what I wanted to say through her.

On the evening of February 22, 1931, in her cell at the convent in Płock, I let her see Me as I wanted the twentieth century — a century I already knew would be the bloodiest in human history — to remember Me. Not as a distant judge, though I am that too when justice is owed, but as Jesus in a white garment, one hand raised in blessing, two rays streaming from near His heart, one pale and one red, and I told her exactly what those rays meant: the pale for the water that justifies souls, the red for the blood that is their life. I asked for the image to be painted and venerated, with the words I gave her to place beneath it: Jezu, ufam Tobie. Jesus, I trust in You. Not a formula. An instruction for how to survive whatever was coming.

I knew she would not be believed easily, and I did not spare her that either. Her early confessors were skeptical, some dismissive, and it was not until she met Father Michael Sopoćko in Vilnius in 1933 that she found a confessor willing to test what she reported against real theology rather than simply forbidding her to speak of it. He is the one who commissioned the first canvas of the image, painted in 1934 by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski under her direct correction — she wept, by her own account, that the painter had not captured the beauty of what she had seen, and I let that grief stand in the record too, because I never promised her the picture would equal the vision. I only promised the picture would be enough.

I instructed her, through her confessors, to keep a diary — a act of obedience she resisted at first as an uneducated woman asked to write theology, and I want to be plain about what that diary became: eventually published as Divine Mercy in My Soul, it is one of the most read spiritual texts of the modern era, and every serious biblical scholar and Vatican theologian who has since examined it has found in it nothing contrary to the faith, only an intensification of what the Gospels already say about Me. I let her suffer tuberculosis for years, wasting in the convent infirmary in Kraków, offering that suffering, by her own account, for sinners and for priests, until I called her home on October 5, 1938. She was thirty-three.

I did not let her message go untested. In 1959, concerned by a poor and misleading Italian translation of her writings, the Holy Office issued a notification restricting the devotion — I permitted that scrutiny, the same scrutiny I permitted for Padre Pio and John Vianney in their own centuries, because a message this large deserved to be examined this carefully. The restriction was lifted in 1978 after a fuller, more accurate investigation, led in part by the Archbishop of Kraków who had grown up in the shadow of her convent and who would soon become Pope John Paul II. When he canonized her on April 30, 2000 — the Second Sunday of Easter — he did something further than any canonization before it: he named that Sunday, for the whole Church, forever, Divine Mercy Sunday. A farm girl with three years of schooling had given the twenty-first century, before it had even begun, the name it would most need to call Me by.

The Record

Helena Kowalska was born August 25, 1905, in Głogowiec, Poland, and entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw in 1925, taking the religious name Maria Faustina. Beginning February 22, 1931, at the convent in Płock, she recorded a series of visions of Jesus as the Divine Mercy, which she described in a diary kept at the direction of her confessors, published posthumously as Divine Mercy in My Soul.

From 1933 she worked closely with her spiritual director, Father Michael Sopoćko in Vilnius, who commissioned the first Divine Mercy image, painted by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski in 1934. Faustina died of tuberculosis on October 5, 1938, in Kraków, at age thirty-three.

A flawed Italian translation of her diary prompted a 1959 Holy Office notification restricting promotion of the devotion; following a renewed investigation, the restriction was formally lifted in 1978. Karol Wojtyła, then Archbishop of Kraków and later Pope John Paul II, was closely involved in advancing her cause, having initiated the process that led to the 1978 lifting of the Vatican restriction shortly after his own election to the papacy. He beatified her on April 18, 1993, and canonized her on April 30, 2000, in Rome, on which occasion he established the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday for the universal Church. Her diary has since been translated into dozens of languages and studied extensively by theologians. Feast day: October 5.