St. Faustina Kowalska

Who they were

Helena Kowalska was the third of ten children of a Polish peasant family, with three winters of schooling, working as a housemaid when she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy at twenty. There she worked the kitchen, the bakery, the garden, and the door, and filled, under obedience to her confessor, six notebooks recording what she described as conversations with Christ, centered on a single insistence: that mercy is God's greatest attribute and that no sin outweighs it. From the diary came the Divine Mercy image, "Jesus, I trust in You", and the chaplet, prayed on ordinary rosary beads, which is why she belongs on this site. She died of tuberculosis at thirty-three in 1938. The diary was initially suppressed on the strength of a bad translation, then rehabilitated; she was canonized in 2000 as the first saint of the new millennium, and the Sunday after Easter is now Divine Mercy Sunday in the universal Church.

Why people turn to St. Faustina Kowalska

People carrying something they believe God will not forgive. That is the entire devotion, and there is no page on this site with a clearer audience.

How to ask their intercession

Her chaplet takes about seven minutes on the beads you already own, the page should link to a how-to. And her prayers can simply be asked: for the person who thinks they are the exception to mercy. ---