SAINT SISTER MARIA FAUSTINA KOWALSKA
(1905-1938)
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Glogowiec - a place of birth of st Faustina.
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Saint Faustina in the family circle (1935).
"Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, known today
the world over as, "The Apostle of The Divine
Mercy," 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 sixteen she left the family hearth to
help her parents by earning
her own livelihood serving as a domestic in the nearby cities of Aleksandrow
and Lodz.
When she was only seven, 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.
After the years she remembers about it in her DIARY:
"Once I was at a dance with one of my sisters and while everybody was having a good time, my soul was experiencing deep torments. As I began to dance, I suddenly saw Jesus at my side, Jesus racked with pain, stripped of his clothing, all covered with wounds, who spoke these words to me, "How long shall I put up with you and how long will you keep putting Me off?" At that moment the charming music stopped, and the company I was with vanished from my sight; there remained Jesus and I. I took a seat by my dear sister, pretending to have a headache in order to cover up what took place in my soul. After a while I slipped out unnoticed, leaving my sister and all my companions behind and made my way to the Cathedral of Saint Stanislaus Kostka (Lodz).
It was almost twilight; there were only a few people in the cathedral. Paying no attention to what was happening around me, I fell prostrate before the Blessed Sacrament and begged the Lord to be good enough to give me to understand what I should do next.
Then I heard these words, "Go at once to Warsaw (Poland), you will enter a convent there." I rose from prayer, came home, and took care of things that needed to be settled.
As best I could, I confided to my sister what took place within my soul. I told her to say good-by to our parents, and thus, in my one dress, with no other belongings, I arrived
in Warsaw (Diary, 9-10).
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Venice
Park - the place of the ball
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Cathedral Church of St. Stanislaw
Kostka in Lodz (Poland) |
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The interior of the Cathedral
Church.
In this place Jesus called St. Faustina to the monastic life.
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 the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy on Zytnia Street in Warsaw and she was accepted. In her DIARY she confessed,
"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).
General home of the Congregation of
the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy,
where sister Faustina entered. Warsaw (Poland), 3/9 Zytnia Street.
Upon her entrance to the Congregation Helen
received the name Sister Mary Faustina. Her novitiate she spent in Cracow,
and there, in the presence of Bishop Stanislaus Rospond, 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 doorkeeper.
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 neighbor.
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 postulantship it became necessary to send her to Skolimow 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.
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 the aid 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 opinion
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 Lagiewniki
in Cracow. In 1966, during the informative process towards Sister Faustina’s
beatification, her body was transferred to the convent chapel" (text
cf. with the footnotes of the Saint Faustina’s DIARY).
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The Cloister of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy.
The place where Sister Faustina earthly remains rest.
Crakow - Lagiewniki (Poland), 3 s. Faustina Street.
ROME, St. Peter’s Square. April
30, 2000.
Pope John Paul II proclaims Sister Faustina Kowalska a saint.
A handwritten excerpt from the DIARY
FORWARD >> Fr. M. Sopocko Biography
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