Faustina Kowalska

Helena Kowalska joined a Warsaw convent at twenty, a peasant girl with little formal education. Transferred to Vilnius, she met Father Michał Sopoćko, who took her reported visions seriously enough to commission the first Divine Mercy painting based on her description of Jesus. She kept a diary of the encounters, filling notebooks with instructions she believed came from Christ about mercy and forgiveness. The Church was skeptical for years after her death from tuberculosis in 1938 at thirty-three. Fifty years later the tide turned: Pope John Paul II, a fellow Pole, canonized her in 2000 and e…