Paperback: Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, a simple, uneducated, young Polish nun receives a special call. Jesus tells her, "I am sending you with My mercy to the people of the whole world. I do not want to punish mankind, but I desire to heal it, pressing it to My merciful Heart." Jesus also tells her to record His message of mercy in a diary: "You are the secretary of My Mercy. I have chosen you for that office in this and the next life."
These words of Jesus are found in the Diary of St Maria Faustina Kowalska, which chronicles Sr Faustina's great experience of Divine Mercy in her soul and her mission to share that mercy with the world.
Though she died in obscurity in 1938, Sr Faustina is now hailed by Pope John Paul II as "the great apostle of Divine Mercy in our time."
On 30 April 2000, the Pope canonized her as St Faustina, saying that the message of Divine Mercy she shared is urgently needed at the dawn of the new millennium. More than 800 000 copies of the Diary have been sold worldwide.
In the Diary, this woman mystic's childlike trust, simplicity and intimacy with Jesus will stir your heart and soul. Her spiritual insights will surprise and reward you. "Only love has meaning," she writes. "It raises up our smallest actions into infinity."
How did St Faustina grow in deeper trust and intimacy with Jesus?
What promises did He make to her?
Discover the answers to these questions and many more in the Diary of St Faustina (1987).
About the author: Saint Faustina is "a gift from God for our times", great mystic, mistress of spiritual life, prophet, who reminded the biblical truth about merciful love of God for every human being and calls to proclaim it to the world through the testimony of life, deed, word and prayer.
Apostle of Divine Mercy, Prophet of Our Times, Great Mystic, Mistress of Spiritual Life - these are the epithets usually appended to the name of Sister Faustyna Kowalska, St Faustyna (Faustina), of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. Sister Faustina is one of the Church’s most popular and widely known saints and the greatest mystics in the history of the Church.
Sister Faustina was born on 25 August 1905 in Głogowiec, Poland to Marianna and Stanisław Kowalski as the third of ten children. Two days later she was baptized with the name Helena in the parish church of Świnice Warckie. At the age of nine, she made her first Holy Communion. She attended elementary school for merely three years and then she went to work as a housekeeper in various well-to-do families in Aleksandrów and Łódź. From the age of seven, she had felt the calling for religious vocation, but her parents would not give her permission to enter the convent. However, impelled by the vision of the Suffering Christ, in July 1924 she left for Warsaw to find a place. For another year she worked as a housekeeper to save some money for a modest monastic trousseau. On 1 August 1925, she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw on Żytnia Street.
She lived in the Congregation for thirteen years, staying in many houses, the longest time (she spent) in Kraków, Płock and Vilnius; working as a cook, shop assistant in baker’s shop, gardener, and portress. She suffered from tuberculosis of the lungs and alimentary system and that is why for over 8 months stayed at the hospital in Kraków - Prądnik. Greater sufferings from those which were caused by tuberculosis, she offered as a voluntary sacrifice for sinners and as the Apostle of Divine Mercy. She experienced also many extraordinary graces such as: apparitions, ecstasies, the gift of bilocation, hidden stigmata, reading into human souls, the mystical betrothal and nuptials.
Sister Faustina’s principal task was to pass on to the Church and world the Message of Mercy, a recapitulation of the Biblical truth of God’s Merciful Love for every human being, and a calling to each of us to entrust our lives to Him and to actively love our neighbour.
Jesus not only revealed the depth of His Mercy to St Faustina, but also gave her new forms of worship: the picture inscribed Jesus, I trust in You, the Feast of Divine Mercy, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and the Prayer in the Hour of His Death on the Cross, the Hour of Mercy. To each of these forms of worship, as well as to the preaching of the message of Mercy, He attached great promises, on condition that we care about the attitude of trust in God that is to fulfil His will and show mercy to our neighbours.
Sister Faustina died in Kraków on 5 October 1938, at the age of just thirty–three. Out of her charism and mystical experience grew the Apostolic Movement of the Divine Mercy which continues her mission, proclaiming the message of Mercy to the world through the testimony of life, deed, words and prayer.
On 18 April 1993, the Holy Father John Paul II raised her to the glory of the altars and on April 30, 2000, numbered her among the saints of the Church. Her relics are in the Shrine of the Divine Mercy at Łagiewniki, Kraków.
The Holy Father John Paul II wrote that in the age of totalitarianisms Sister Faustina became the ambassador of the message that the only power strong enough to counteract their evil is the truth of God’s Mercy. He called her Diary a Gospel of Mercy written from a 20th-century perspective, which has helped people to survive the extremely painful experiences of these times.
"This message," Pope Benedict XVI has said, "the message of Mercy as the Divine Power, as God putting a check on all the world’s evil, is indeed the chief message of our times."
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