divine-mercy-in-my-soul

Kolbe, the martyr of love, and Sister [now Saint] Faustina Kowalska, the Apostle of The Divine
Mercy.
Rome, December 20, 1980
+ Andrew M. Deskur
Titular Archbishop of Tene
.
INTRODUCTION
1. Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, known today the world over as the
“Apostle of the Divine Mercy,” is numbered by theologians among the outstanding mystics of
the Church.
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
fourteen she left the family hearth to help her parents and to earn her own livelihood serving
as a domestic in the nearby cities of Aleksandrów and Lódz.
When she was only seven (two years before her First Holy Communion), 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. Pressed on,
however, by a vision of the suffering Christ and by the words of His reproach: “How long
shall I put up with you and how long will you keep putting Me off?” (Diary, 9), she bagan to
search for a convent to join. 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 Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy on Zytnia Street in Warsaw. In
her Diary she declared: “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).
After a few weeks she experienced nonetheless a strong temptation to transfer
to a different congregation in which there would be more time for prayer. It was then the Lord
Jesus, manifesting to her His wounded and tortured face, said: “It is you who will cause Me
6