Life of Saint Faustina
Helena Kowalska was the third child in a large family in Poland. Her mother and father did not have children for ten years, but her maternal grandmother prayed everyday at Mass for her daughter and assured her that the Lord would give her children. After ten years the parents were blessed with a daughter. The birth was very difficult.
After another year, another daughter was born, and the labor was even worse. When the mother was pregnant for the third time, she was quite worried about what was going to happen during labor. She prayed fervently, and Helena Kowalska was born with no complications on August 25th, 1905. The mother said that Helena forever blessed her womb.
Then there were seven more children, but two died very early in life. Helena helped raise the rest of the children.
The name Helen, or Helena, is a name that comes from the Gods of the Sun. Helena's Baptism was registered in Russian because Poland was then part of Russia. It is interesting to note that just to the south of her birthplace was the birthplace of Maximillion Kolbe. One could say that they were born in the heart of Poland.
Saint Faustina was born in a village close to the geographic center of the heart of Europe. It has been said that whatever the faith of Poland, so too was the rest of Europe.
Helena was born to very poor parents. Her father received a little bit of land at his wedding, and on it he and his wife built a little stone house. In the morning, he would work his fields, and in the afternoon he would go around the countryside fixing houses and doing carpenter's work. We are told that his wife would make his lunch and bring it to him wherever he was working, it did not matter if it was snowing or raining. And on the way back she would pick up sticks for the fireplace and stove. She made sure that everything was done around the house. She was not an educated woman, but was very pious and constant in instructing the children in the Catholic faith. As the children grew, she taught them a proper fear of the Lord. The father was very strict with the children, and we are told of a story where one of the sons broke off a limb from a tree, and for it he got a severe spanking that he never forgot.
When Helena was a little girl about at the age of three or four, she was already having visions. She told her mother that she saw the Blessed Mother on top of a beautiful field, and that Our Lady took her up there. The family told her to forget it.
One evening during a family talk, possibly a Sunday evening, her father was joking with Helena. He was telling her things like, "You're not my daughter, you belong to a fellow neighbor down the road." She was so upset and went to get her handkerchief to put her things inside and went down the road to the neighbor's house. Her mother was moved with compassion for her daughter, and went after her. She convinced Faustina that she belonged to the family, and told her that her father was joking with her and that he would never let her leave. This is one of the earliest situations and evidence that we have of Helena being obedient. When she was a little older, her mother would wake up in the middle of the night and see her praying on her bed. "You better go back to sleep to get your rest," she would tell the young girl. "Mother, the angels keep waking me up to pray," she replied. Interestingly enough, when she was older and went out to work the same things happened. She would often get up to pray and would turn towards where she knew there was a church. Later on, one of the sisters said Helena had permission from her confessors to get up. She would turn where Our Lord was in the Blessed Sacrament. So this was something that the Lord must have encouraged her to do from a very early age.
She had a great love of the Holy Eucharist. While people were writing her life story for the official beatification process, one of the questions was whether there was anything in the surrounding area of her birth that would have been a contributing factor in her life. We were not able to get much from her parents, but her father taught her to read at a very early age. He would read story after story of missionaries over and over to Helena, and she would repeat them in the neighborhood to other children. She told them that when she grew up she was going to be a missionary, and the kids said, "We will all go with you!"
However, she really had no idea what the religious life was or what a hermitage was; she only knew from what her father read to her. It was when the priest was preparing her for first Holy Communion that she learned what the priesthood and religious life was, and she soon began to under-stand what the Lord was calling her to.
One day when she was in church for vespers before the exposed Blessed Sacrament, she felt called to the religious life, and from that moment on, she made a little cell for Jesus in her heart, to keep Him company. Her constant desire was to go to church to be with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.
We are told that when she was a child, the family was so poor that there were only one or two dresses in the family. Her older sisters had the priority to go to church so the one who had the dress went to church, while the others had to stay home and help around the house. At one point in her story, we read that one day the father found the kids very reluctant to help out with the farm work. The father said that the one who got up early enough to let the cows out to pasture would be permitted to go to church. So Helena got up very early in the morning and opened the window ahead of time, so as not to make noise at night. There were two rooms and a hallway in the house and all were living there. Faustina got up during the night, climbed out the window so as not to wake anybody up, and went out to the barn. She tied two or three of the cows together and the others followed. Then she took them out to pasture. Her father awakened that morning and found everyone asleep. Thinking no one got up to take care of the cows, he went out to the barn to feed them. He saw the barn door open and the cows gone, and he wondered who could have left the door open. He thought perhaps the cows were stolen and he became angry and ready to do battle. He went out the gate to see if he could see any of the cows. He told this story so well that everyone remembered it, and the children related it later on. As he continued to look for the cows, he saw Helena singing out in the field. He was infuriated and thought she had left the gate open and ruined all the fields. "I am going to get that kid — she is going to destroy all these fields of rye and wheat." He was taking his belt off getting ready for her punishment, when to his astonishment, he saw the cows walking just on the path one behind another in the field without a blade being disturbed. He was so stunned by what he saw, he thought, "How can this kid keep the cows on the path like this?"
Whenever she could not go to church, she would hide in the garden with her father's big prayer book. She would not come out unless the church service was over, not even when her mother would call her out to her to do errands. If called to help take care of the children, she would not respond. When the service was over, she would come out and kiss her mother's hand. "Mother, pardon me. I have to be obedient to God, and I have to do my responsibilities to Him first. Punish me as you want, but I have to do my duty to God first. Now I will do anything you want me to do." Even in her early childhood, God had first priority in her life; and she would not let anything stop it.
Her family told the story that after she made her first Holy Communion, she was the most obedient of the children. Her parents loved her so much, and they knew they could count on her. When the rest of the children got into trouble, they would get severely punished. We are told that occasionally she would shield them and take their punishment. But when the kids were being picked on, she would complain and tell them, "If you were obedient, dad would not pick on you!" Somehow all the children were very different and had their own form of disobedience. In fact, the people who knew the family said that they did not know how a saint could come from that family. You can see Helena was a chosen child, even from birth. And because of the direction her parents gave her, she made the choice at the right time. St. Therese the Little Flower said that at the age of three she gave her whole life to God, and that she knew what she was doing.
After Helena's First Holy Communion, when people were coming back from church and the girls were showing off their communion dresses and gifts they got, Helena was going home all alone and not in the company of anybody. Someone asked her, "Why are you going home all alone?" She said, "I am not. I have Jesus with me." She was all excited and talked with Jesus all the way home. She did not want to go home with the other girls. Someone asked one of the other girls why they were so happy on their First Communion Day, and she said because she got a beautiful dress. They asked Helen, "Why are you so happy?" and she said, "because I have Jesus in my heart." You can see the evidence was already there at an early age.
As was said before, people wondered if there was an influence on her and the only thing found was something that happened about two years before Faustina was born. The church was having Forty Hours Adoration. The Adoration lasted for three complete days, and one of those days, two altar servers ran home to tell their parents that they saw the head of Christ crowned with thorns in the Host on the altar. The parents ran down to the church.
They started telling people that the boys had seen the head of Christ crowned with thorns in the Host in the monstrance. The word spread around very quickly. The people from the village came, as well as other villages, to see the face of Christ in the Host. They all wanted to see the Face of Christ. The story was told that the crowd was so big and so unruly, that the people broke down the altar rail, broke down the church wall to the priest's house, and broke down the confessional. It was a disaster, and the news got to the bishop. The bishop sent the dean in to make an investigation, and to speak to about a hundred people. Some said yes, they saw the face of Christ with the thorns in the Host. Some said no, that they did not see anything. The result of the investigation was that it was a shadow from the candles on the altar burning that caused the boys to see the Face of Christ on the altar. That was the conclusion from the study. However, accounts of the event lasted so long, that even years later the people still kept coming to this church in hope that they would see the Face of Christ. Nowhere in Saint Faustina's writings or anywhere in the family's depositions was the story recounted. So could Helena have heard about this? A Jesuit priest, who was the premiere Polish historian and custodian of Polish history in Rome, was consulted. He was asked if he thought that St. Faustina had heard of this alleged miracle. He was convinced that the answer was yes. He said that things like that lingered for years, and people kept coming to see the miracle years later. The very fact this event happened in this parish two years before she was born may be significant. It could very well be that having heard this story, she was so convinced of others seeing the Face of Jesus in the Host that it colored her whole life, and gave the direction for her of living for Jesus in the Eucharist.
If we learn about and follow the life of Saint Faustina, we come to a deeper understanding of Sacred Scripture, "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy" (Mt 5:7).