Divine Mercy: The Heart of the Gospel

‘My name is sacrifice” : The Mission of Blessed Faustina 91 as He is. Words emerge from the Trinitarian light and Jesus as the invis­ ible God made visible, teaching her to come to know Him by his attrib­ utes. It is noteworthy that Jesus is distinguished by his wounds and by the sign of the Cross he traces. Mercy will be the attribute: the Cross will be the sign. Faustina: The Personal Mission Although Balthasar insists on the importance o f “objectivity” in holi­ ness, the person of Faustina, not unlike other saints, is itself part o f the message. One o f her confessors, Jesuit Father Joseph Andrasz, wrote of her: “according to the loving designs o f the Savior, the very person of the saintly Sister Faustina is to play a special role in the spreading o f the devotion to The Divine Mercy.” 13 So our look at her mission will nec­ essarily be an interweaving o f objective and personal elements. The single greatest source on Blessed Faustina is her own spiritual Diary, a veritable goldmine o f the inner life.14 It contains some 1828 numbered paragraphs (644 pgs.). The present diary is a second start; during an absence o f her spiritual director, she burned her first one after several years, and the reconstruction from memory heightens a fairly free-flowing style which certainly lacks the structured presentation of other mystics. The impression one receives from reading her Diary, the sole writing of hers we have, is that her life was characterized by alter­ nating suffering and by consolation in Christ. It seems that characteris­ tically the desolations were long, the consolations intense but brief. They alternate rapidly in her journal, joy and anguish replacing each other in turn, like light and shadow on a windy day. What is perhaps most appealing about her is the increasing helpless­ ness this robust farm girl experiences, having concretized her trust in God by committing herself to a religious community. Her sufferings no less than her many locutions with Christ are part o f the mission to which she was called. Thus we need to have some sense o f her life before look­ ing at the theological implications o f her mission. It has been observed that Blessed Faustina’s background and charac­ ter were so typical o f the classic lives of the saints as to seem cliched. Helen Kowalska was born in 1905 in that western-most part o f the Russian Empire that had once long ago been, and would soon be again, Poland. She came from a poor rural background, bom into a large