Faustina Kowalska

Faustina Kowalska, born Helena Kowalska and known in religion as Maria Faustyna Kowalska of the Blessed Sacrament, was a Polish Catholic religious sister and mystic who lived from 1905 to 1938. She reported apparitions of Jesus Christ that inspired the Catholic devotion to the Divine Mercy, and is sometimes called its secretary; throughout her life she reported visions of and conversations with Jesus, which she recorded in a diary later published as The Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy in My Soul. At age twenty she joined a convent in Warsaw and was later transferred to Plock and then Vilnius, where she met her confessor and spiritual director Father Michal Sopocko, who supported her devotion to the Divine Mercy and, with her help, commissioned an artist to paint the first Divine Mercy image based on her vision of Jesus. The Catholic Church canonized her as a saint on 30 April 2000, and she is venerated as the Apostle of Divine Mercy; her tomb is in the Divine Mercy Sanctuary in Krakow.