Devotions

St. Faustina Kowalska

How to Celebrate the Feast Near you

A Polish religious sister who died in 1938 at 33. The Divine Mercy image, the Divine Mercy Chaplet and Divine Mercy Sunday all come from what she recorded in her Diary.

In the United States, October 5 is a weekday with two optional memorials, St. Faustina and Bl. Francis Xavier Seelos, so a parish Mass may keep either one or neither.

How to Celebrate the Feast

Helena Kowalska was born in Poland in 1905, the third of ten children in a farming family. In 1925 she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy and took the name Sister Maria Faustina, working as a cook, gardener and porter. She reported that on February 22, 1931, in Płock, Jesus appeared to her and asked for an image with the words “Jesus, I trust in You.” She died of tuberculosis in Kraków on October 5, 1938. St. John Paul II canonized her on April 30, 2000, and that day named the Second Sunday of Easter Divine Mercy Sunday. Her memorial was added to the Church’s universal calendar in 2020.

1. Go to Mass. Find Mass timesHer memorial is optional, so your parish may or may not keep it. Any Mass that day is a good way to mark it.
2. Pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet. How to pray it, step by stepIt uses ordinary rosary beads.
3. Stop at three in the afternoon, the Hour of Mercy, for the chaplet or a short prayer.
4. Pray the words on the image: “Jesus, I trust in You.”
5. Do a work of mercy. Her message asks for mercy toward others as well as trust in God: visit someone sick or alone, or forgive someone.

How to Pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet

The chaplet is prayed on ordinary rosary beads, in five decades.

1. Begin with the Sign of the Cross, then one Our Father, one Hail Mary and the Apostles’ Creed. The words of these prayers
2. On each large bead, pray the “Eternal Father” prayer, offering God the Father the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of his Son, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.
3. On each of the ten small beads, pray:“For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”
4. Repeat the large-bead and small-bead prayers for all five decades.
5. To close, pray three times the “Holy God” prayer, calling on God as holy, mighty and immortal and asking his mercy on us and on the whole world.

The full words of each prayer, from the Marian Fathers, the religious order that spreads the devotion.

Many pray the chaplet at three in the afternoon, the hour of Jesus’ death, which St. Faustina called the Hour of Mercy.

Indulgence

Praying the day’s Mass prayer or another approved prayer in her honor on her memorial carries a partial indulgence, as does praying an approved invocation to the merciful Jesus, such as “Jesus, I trust in You.” On Divine Mercy Sunday, the Sunday after Easter, the Church grants a plenary indulgence for taking part in prayers and devotions in honor of Divine Mercy in a church or chapel, under the usual conditions (confession, Communion, a prayer for the pope’s intentions, and being free of attachment to any sin, even venial).

Source: Enchiridion of Indulgences, grant 21; Apostolic Penitentiary, Divine Mercy Sunday decree, 2002.

Learn more

• St. Faustina Kowalska, biography Vatican
• St. Faustina Kowalska Vatican News
• Decree adding her memorial to the calendar, 2020 Vatican
• How to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet Marian Fathers