Saint Faustina Kowalska, Virgin

Helena Kowalska was born in 1905 at Głogowiec in central Poland, the third of ten children of a peasant family, and had less than three years of schooling. She worked as a housemaid and in 1925 entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, taking the name Faustina, where she worked as cook, gardener and porter. In her diary she recorded visions in which, she wrote, Christ asked for devotion to his mercy, and in 1934 in Vilnius, with her confessor Michał Sopoćko, she had the image inscribed “Jesus, I trust in you” painted. She died of tuberculosis in Kraków on 5 October 1938, aged 33. John Paul II canonized her in 2000 and set the Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday.