Divine Mercy: The Heart of the Gospel

“My name is sacrifice” : The Mission of Blessed Faustina 113 Maria Tamawska argues in her fine biography; it may even be misleading unless supplemented with other information “from outside,” information which Tamawska helpfully supplies (Tamawska, Sister Faustina, p. 412). is Ibid., p. 13. 16 Ibid., p. 363. 17 Ibid., p. 249. Tamawska compares the Abrahamic call with that issued to Faustina to be ready to sacrifice all, her vocation to the congrega­ tion, the actual sacrifice of which, like that of Isaac, was not in the end required. 18 As quoted in ibid., p. 75. 19 Sister Sophia Michalenko, Mercy My Mission (Stockbridge, MA, 1995), p. 29. 20 Ibid., p. 27. 21 Tamawska, Sister Faustina, p. 118. Indeed, her new spiritual director subjected her to a psychiatric evaluation which gave her a clean bill of health (155). 22 As the city was in the Polish state at the time, we use the spelling of Vilno which was dominant in the West until after the Second World War. 23 Michalenko, Mercy My Mission, p. 25. 24 Tamawska, Sister Faustina, p. 10. 25 St. Paul of the Cross speaks of “infused pain or infused torments” and the “impression” of the Passion of Jesus in the soul (Bialas, The Mysticism o f the Passion, p. 203). 26 Tamawska, Sister Faustina, p. 176. 27 She Made an Ordinary Life Extraordinary, compiled by Sr. M. Elzbieta Siepak, trans. Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa (Crakow: Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, 1995), p. 13. 28 Ibid. 29 Tamawska, Sister Faustina, p. 97. 30 Interestingly, Saint Maximilian Kolbe also suffered from tuberculosis, beginning his great missionary work “as a tuberculosis patient with advanced changes in his lungs” (ibid., p. 296). 3' Ibid., p. 254. 32 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesus” Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift: Communio 8 (January 1979), p. 39. 33 Her spiritual director, skeptical of her claims that Mercy is the greatest of God’s attributes, became convinced of this through St. Thomas and