The Invisible Stigmata of St. Faustina Kowalska

In the midst of unspeakable chaos, we must remember that God sends men and women—saints—who are most needed at the time.

St. Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), who would make known to the world the message of Divine Mercy, confirms that principle. In his divine Providence, God sent her into a world on the eve of unspeakable mercilessness. What is even more fitting is that she was born in Poland, where World War II began with Hitler’s invasion. The Catholic biographer J.K. Huysmans writes, “All through the ages there have been found saints willing to pay, by their sufferings, the ransom for the sins and faults of others.”  Faustina’s Diary evidences a woman who was heroically willing to do just that.

Faustina (Helen Kowalska) explains that when she was only seven years old, “I heard God’s voice in my soul.”  This would only be the first of many times that Helen heard the voice of God. When she was eighteen, Helen desperately appealed to her parents to permit her to enter the convent, but her parents refused. After this, Helen’s thoughts wandered away from thoughts of the religious life to more worldly pursuits and entertainment. During a dance, Jesus appeared to her and asked, “How long shall I put up with you and how long will you keep putting Me off?”  Rushing to the nearby Cathedral of St. Stanislaus Kostka, Helen fell down in adoration of the Eucharist, and pleaded with Jesus for instructions on how to proceed in following him. She heard a voice: “Go at once to Warsaw; you will enter a convent there.”  

Soon afterward, Helen joined the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy and, in 1926, took the name “Sr. Mary Faustina of the Most Blessed Sacrament.” Five years later, Jesus appeared to Faustina with a special request. In her diary, she recounts,

In the evening, when I was in my cell, I saw the Lord Jesus clothed in a white garment. One hand [was] raised in the gesture of blessing, the other was touching the garment at the breast. From beneath the garment, slightly drawn aside at the breast, there were emanating two large rays, one red, the other pale. In silence I kept my gaze fixed on the Lord; my soul was struck with awe, but also with great joy. 

After a while, Jesus said to me, “Paint an image according to the pattern you see, with the signature: Jesus, I trust in you. I desire that this image be venerated, first in your chapel, and [then] throughout the world. I promise that the soul that will venerate this image will not perish. I also promise victory over [its] enemies already here on earth, especially at the hour of death. I Myself will defend it as My own glory.” 

The Divine Mercy painting is the fulfillment of that request, and today, reproductions of the image adorn churches and homes on all the continents of earth. 

Though Faustina was widely known before her canonization in the latter half of the twentieth century, her canonization by Pope St. John Paul II magnified the message of Jesus’ unfathomable mercy through her. This fulfilled and continues to fulfill Jesus’ words to her, who had chosen her, as he said, “to make known to souls the great mercy that I have for them, and to exhort them to trust in the bottomless depth of My mercy.”  He continued, “I am sending you with My mercy to the people of the whole world. I do not want to punish aching mankind, but I desire to heal it, pressing it to My Merciful Heart. . . . You are the secretary of My mercy; I have chosen you for that office in this life and the next life.”  

What even many Catholics who have a great devotion to St. Faustina do not know, however, is that she suffered the wounds of the Passion in invisible stigmata. She explains in her diary, “When I experienced these sufferings for the first time, it was like this: after the annual vows, on a certain day, during prayer, I saw a great brilliance and, issuing from the brilliance, rays which completely enveloped me. Then suddenly, I felt a terrible pain in my hands, my feet and my side and the thorns of the crown of thorns. I experienced these sufferings during holy Mass on Friday, but this was only for a brief moment. This was repeated for several Fridays.”  In the years that followed, Sr. Faustina experienced stigmatic pains numerous times. Her description of them in September of 1936 provides great insight into the reason for the stigmata itself: suffering for others. She writes,

During holy Mass one Friday, I felt myself pierced by the same sufferings, and this has been repeated on every Friday and sometimes when I meet a soul that is not in the state of grace. Although this is infrequent, and the suffering lasts a very short time, still it is terrible, and I would not be able to bear it without a special grace from God. There is no outward indication of these sufferings. What will come later, I do not know. All this, for the sake of souls.  

Later in her diary, she writes, “Today, for a short while, I experienced the pain of the crown of thorns. I was praying for a certain soul before the Blessed Sacrament at the time. In an instant, I felt such a violent pain that my head dropped onto the altar rail. Although this moment was very brief, it was very painful.”  As Jesus endured the Passion and Crucifixion for the sake of sinners, Faustina was willing to shoulder the burden of the sins of others for the sake of their souls. 

This is the message of Jesus’ passion. This is the message of mercy. This is the message of the stigmata. To borrow the words of the Divine Mercy chaplet, Faustina endured the mystical stigmata “for the sake of his sorrowful passion.” Like Catherine of Siena and Lucy of Narni, Faustina suffered bloodless stigmata. Perhaps this was to illustrate that one is not required to shed blood to endure suffering for others. The vast majority of empathetic suffering does not involve the shedding of blood—and it is a dangerous and erroneous proposition that suggests otherwise. Of course, the reason for invisibility could simply lie in humility, but then, every saint is humble. Faustina, however, had a particular devotion to the practice of holy silence. To consider only a few brief extracts from her Diary:

In the sufferings of soul or body, I try to keep silence, for then my spirit gains the strength that flows from the Passion of Jesus. I have ever before my eyes His sorrowful Face, abused and disfigured, His divine Heart pierced by our sins and especially by the ingratitude of chosen souls. 

In the silence of my heart I kept saying to myself, “O Christ, may delights, honor and glory be Yours, and suffering be mine. I will not lag one step behind as I follow You, though thorns wound my feet.” 

O my Jesus, You alone know the longings and the sufferings of my heart. I am glad I can suffer for You, however little. When I feel that the suffering is more than I can bear, I take refuge in the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and I speak to Him with profound silence. 

Not only did Faustina strive to suffer in silence, but silence itself became her special share in the passion of the Lord, as she was held in derision by those who could not understand it.  Indeed, Sr. Faustina only mentioned her pain at her spiritual advisor’s counsel to write about it; otherwise, the world may have never known about her stigmata at all. That is a particularly intriguing speculation, not only as it applies to Faustina but to the virtually unknown holy men and women of Christendom who may have been granted invisible stigmata as well. 

Faustina died at age thirty-three. The “Secretary of Mercy” could now do her work—as Jesus had promised—in heaven. And she needed to pray very hard in the presence of God, because eleven months after she died, Adolf Hitler rolled his tanks into her native Poland to begin World War II. 
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