St. Faustina Kowalska Press the flag Read below
My all time favorite Saint, St. Faustinia Story, She was born Helena Kowalska on August 25, 1905, in the small farming village of Głogowiec, Poland. Her parents, Stanisław and Marianna, were poor peasants. Stanisław was a farmer and carpenter; Marianna, who could not read, raised the children and trained them in the faith. Helena was the third of ten children. The family was devout. They prayed together at night, sang the Loreto Litany in May, recited the rosary in October, and read the Lives of the Saints. Stanisław sang hymns in the early morning and read the Lives of the Saints to his family. It was in this world humble, prayerful, and poor that Helena's faith took root. From the very beginning, Helena was different. Her mother noticed that the girl sometimes got up at night to kneel and pray. When her mother warned her that she would go mad if she kept it up, Helena replied: "Mummy, it must be an angel that wakes me up for prayers." At the age of seven, during Vespers, while the Eucharist was exposed in the monstrance, she experienced what she could only describe as an understanding of the things of God. From that moment, she felt the first stirrings of a religious vocation a calling that would not leave her for the rest of her life. She prepared deeply for her First Holy Communion, which she received at the age of nine. Afterward, when a friend asked why she was walking alone, she answered: "I'm not alone, I'm walking with Jesus." She had a natural compassion for the poor. Once, she held a lottery to help beggars who had come to the village. Another time, she dressed in her mother's old clothes, went from house to house as a beggar herself, and gave the money she collected to the parish priest for the poor. Her mother called her "the best of the children." Her brother Stanisław remembered that she would recite stories about hermits and missionaries to the other children while they grazed cattle, and that she told them she would enter a convent when she grew up. They laughed. They did not understand. In Warsaw, Helena searched for a convent that would take her. She was turned away at every gate. She was poor. She had no dowry. She had only three years of schooling. She was, by one mother superior's description, "unremarkable in appearance, rather feeble, a maidservant and cook by profession, without a dowry, without even a small trousseau." Eventually, she was admitted to speak with the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. Mother Michaela Moraczewska, the superior of the Warsaw house, initially considered turning her away because of her shabby appearance. But she decided it would be more charitable to speak with her. During the conversation, something shifted. Mother Michaela wanted to admit her, but advised Helena to ask "the Master of the house" whether He would accept her. Helena went to the chapel and prayed. She later recounted that she heard: "I admit you, you are in My heart." When she repeated these words to Mother Superior, the reply came: "If the Lord has admitted you, then so do I." Even then, she could not enter immediately. She was too poor. She had to continue working and save money for a small trousseau while her vocation was tested. She worked for another year as a nanny for the Lipszyc family in Ostrówek, saving what she could. During this time, during the octave of Corpus Christi, she experienced an inner illumination and came to know God as the Supreme Good and Beauty. In simple words, she made a private vow of perpetual chastity. During her thirteen years in the Congregation, Sister Faustina lived in several houses in Kraków, Płock, and Vilnius and performed the most ordinary tasks. She worked as a cook. She worked as a shop assistant in a bakery. She worked as a gardener, despite having no previous gardening experience. She worked as a portress, the sister who answered the door at the entrance lodge, where she assisted vagrants, the unemployed, hungry children, and anyone who came asking for help. Externally, her life was unremarkable. She was uneducated. She did the humblest jobs. She was cheerful and kind. No one outside a small circle of superiors and confessors had any idea that something extraordinary was happening inside her soul. All I can write for now
