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Rating: Reading Santa Teresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross, one discovers that there is something even higher than the pages of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Speculative theology—even the greatest—must yield the scepter to mystical theology.
But Santa Teresa and Saint John must, in turn, yield the scepter to the diary of a humble Polish nun, Helena Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905 – 1938). A diary that surpasses the writings of the two great Carmelite mystics for a compelling reason: here the co-author is the Redeemer Himself.
To the young Helena, the Savior entrusted a great mission:
- “Your task will be to write down everything I will make known to you about My Mercy, for the good of the souls that reading these writings will find inner comfort and be encouraged to come closer to Me.”
We thought the Trinity was the most incomprehensible mystery. We were wrong:
- “My deepest Mystery is Mercy. My Mercy is so great that no mind, neither human nor angelic, will ever fathom it—even if they engage in it for eternity. In the future life, every soul will contemplate My Goodness eternally. My Love and My Mercy have no limits.”
The Lord chooses what is weak to confound those who think they are strong. For Faustina, it was no different:
- “If I revealed to you all your misery, you would die of fright. But because you are such a great misery, I have revealed to you the whole sea of My Mercy. I always use weak creatures to accomplish My works.”
Christ used His humble instrument to carry out a great project:
- “I want the first Sunday after Easter to be the Feast of My Mercy. On that day, whoever approaches confession and holy Communion will obtain complete forgiveness of sins and punishment.”
A desire that was fully realized in the Spring of 2000, when John Paul II instituted the feast so desired by the Son of God.
Christ also wanted an image to be painted—which can be found in the Church of the Holy Spirit in Sassia, Rome, and today known as the "Image of Merciful Jesus":
- “Paint an image according to the model you see, with the inscription: 'Jesus, I trust in You!' I desire this image to be venerated worldwide. The pale ray represents Water—which justifies souls; the red ray represents the Blood—which is the life of souls. Both rays came forth when, on the cross, My Heart, already in agony, was pierced by the lance.”
To the feast of Divine Mercy and the image, the Lord added the gift of a chaplet that was inspired to Faustina on Friday, November 13, 1935:
- “That evening, in my cell, I saw an Angel. He was the executor of God's wrath. He was to strike a certain place for reasons that I cannot reveal. So I began to pray to the Angel to stop. But my plea was to no avail. At that moment, I saw the Most Holy Trinity. At the same time, raptured before the Throne of God, I began to implore the Eternal Father with words I heard internally:
“Eternal Father,
I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity
of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ,
in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world;
for the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us.”
As I prayed thus, I saw the Angel’s impotence no longer able to carry out the chastisement.”
Throughout the diary, the Lord obsessively exhorts His chosen one to recite this simple prayer:
- “Recite unceasingly the chaplet I have taught you. With the recitation of the chaplet, you bring humanity closer to Me. Whoever will recite it will obtain great Mercy at the hour of death. Priests will recommend it to sinners as their last hope of salvation. Even if there were the most hardened sinner, if he recites this chaplet even once, he will obtain grace from My infinite Mercy. I desire to grant unimaginable graces to the souls who trust in My Goodness.”
Finally, Christ suggested to Faustina a particular moment of recollection:
- “At three o’clock, implore My Mercy for humanity, especially for sinners. And, even if for a brief moment, immerse yourself in My Passion, particularly My abandonment at the moment of death. It is the hour of great Mercy for the whole world.”
The saints called Communion a “preview of eternal life.” The Savior confirms it to us:
- “Eternal life must begin already on this earth through holy Communion. My daughter, never forget Communion except when you are fully aware of having fallen gravely. Apart from this, do not fear to unite yourself with Me in My mystery of Love. Your little defects will disappear in the fire of My love—like a straw thrown into a great fire. I have established a throne of Mercy on earth, and this throne is the tabernacle. From this throne, I desire to descend into human hearts. I have surrounded Myself neither with a retinue nor with guards; anyone can come to Me at any time. When, in Communion, I enter a human heart, I have my hands full of graces of all kinds that I wish to grant to souls—but souls do not even pay attention to Me. How sad it is for Me to see souls who do not wish to know My Love! They treat Me as something inert. In some hearts, it is as if I am facing another Passion.”
Love for those who wish us ill. It is here that one truly sees who follows the Master:
- “My disciple, have great love for those who make you suffer. Do good to those who hate you.
- “O my Master, You see well that I have no feelings of love for them.”
- “LOVE IS NOT A FEELING, BUT AN ACT OF WILL. And feeling is not always in your power. You will know you have true love if, after experiencing displeasure and opposition, you do not lose your calm but pray for those from whom you have received suffering, and desire good for them.”
- “But Lord, don’t you see how they abuse my goodness…”
- “And so… do you think they don’t abuse mine? But I forgive anyway.”
A revelation that gives us hope:
- “Do not fear. Even if at times it appears that the wicked triumph, remember that sooner or later they are always defeated. In the long run, evil always loses.”
Of course, Saint Faustina could not avoid speaking of abortion:
- “September 16, 1937. This evening I so desired to make the Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament. But God’s will was different. At eight o’clock I was seized by such violent pains that I had to lie down immediately. I continued to writhe in agony for three hours—until eleven. No medicine did me any good; the one I took, I vomited. Due to the pain, I even lost consciousness. When the pain ceased, Jesus revealed to me that He had made me participate in His suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane—in reparation FOR CHILDREN KILLED IN THE WOMB OF WICKED MOTHERS.”
Faustina too could not resist the temptation to ask the Lord what we all would like to know:
- “The Lord made me know the sins committed throughout the world on this day. I fainted from fright. And, despite knowing the abyss of Divine Mercy, I cannot understand how God keeps humanity alive. Immediately afterward, the Lord made known to me who holds up the world: it is the chosen souls. When the number of the elect is complete, the world will cease to exist. Then I asked Jesus: why do you allow certain men to commit such horrendous crimes?”
- “I have all eternity to punish them. Now I extend to them the time of Mercy.”
And these are the words of Christ to those who stubbornly reject the inner voice of truth:
“Tell sinners that none of them will escape My hands. If they run away from My merciful Heart, they will fall into the hands of My justice. Tell them that I am always waiting for them. Write that I speak to them with the pangs of conscience, failures, sufferings, storms, and lightning. If they ultimately make all My graces vain, I begin to get angry with them, abandon them to themselves, and give them what they desire...”.
This is how the saint describes the death of a person who rejected the voice of conscience all their lives:
- “Today I saw a certain soul who was about to be separated from the body amidst terrible tortures. How dreadful death is. The hour when we will see all our actions in their complete nakedness and misery. None of them will be lost; they will follow us faithfully to God’s judgment. I have no words or terms of comparison to express such terrible things...”
What will happen after death? This one page WORTHY OF DANTE tells us, even if it comes from the pen of a nearly illiterate person:
- “Today, under the guidance of an angel, I was in the abysses of hell. It is a place of great torment for its entire extent. These are the tortures: the first, which constitutes hell itself, the loss of God; the second, the continuous pangs of conscience; the third, the awareness that that fate will never change; the fourth, the fire that penetrates the soul but does not annihilate it; the fifth, continuous darkness, (…) along with the vision of the evil done by oneself and by others; the sixth, the continuous company of Satan; the seventh, the terrible despair, the hatred of God, the curses, the maledictions, the blasphemies. What I have written is only a faint shadow of the things I saw. I write this by the order of God, so that no soul justifies itself by saying that hell is not there, or that no one has ever been there and no one knows what it is like. I, Sister Faustina, by God’s order, was in the abysses of hell, to tell it to souls and witness that hell truly exists. One thing I noticed: THE MAJORITY OF DAMNED SOULS ARE SOULS THAT, WHEN THEY WERE ALIVE, DID NOT BELIEVE THAT HELL EXISTED.”
Unfathomable mystery the agony in Gethsemane. In the diary, Christ reveals the meaning of His words in the Garden of Olives. We thought that even He—in His humanity—had backed down. And instead…
- “Lukewarm souls offend Me the most terribly. In the Garden of Olives, it was they who tore from Me the cry: 'Father, take this cup away from Me.' For them the recourse to My Mercy is the last anchor of salvation.”
THE AMORALS. Always them. It was the cup of the amorals that Love itself refused to drink. It was the insipid that caused Him to sweat blood.
Every amoral disgusts the Lord, But when the amorals are the consecrated ones, the words of the Lord are truly terrifying:
- “Love has been expelled from convents. Souls without love and without the spirit of sacrifice; souls full of selfishness and self-love; proud and presumptuous souls; souls full of treachery and hypocrisy; lukewarm souls who have just enough warmth to keep themselves alive. All the graces I pour out on the consecrated every day slide away like over a rock. I CANNOT STAND THEM BECAUSE THEY ARE NEITHER GOOD NOR BAD. I have set up the convents so that the world may be sanctified through them; from them must arise a powerful flame of love and sacrifice. And if they don’t convert and ignite with the initial love, I will hand them over to the extermination of this world... How will they be able to sit on the promised throne, to judge the world, if their faults are greater than those of the world... O soul, who received Me in Communion in the morning, and at noon you burn with hatred against Me in the most varied forms! O heart, did I choose you in a particular way so that you might cause Me more suffering? The great sins of the world wound Me on the surface, but the sins of an elect soul pierce Me from one side to the other...”.
BETTER AN ANTICHRISTIAN THAN HALF A CHRISTIAN. The words of Christ to Faustina are truly the moral of “No Country for Old Men.”
But it does not end here. John Paul II, in 2002, called pedophile priests “SERVANTS OF SATAN.” But here it is the Son of God speaking:
- “Thursday. Night adoration. Tonight I saw Jesus tied to the pillar, stripped of His garments and subjected to flogging. Four men in turn whipped the Lord with scourges. And Jesus made me know for which sins He subjected Himself to flogging: impure sins. At one point, Christ said to me: “I have a suffering even greater than what you see. Look at humanity in the present situation.” At that moment, the executioners moved away, and other men began to unload their venom on the innocent. I found it hard to believe what I was seeing: they were priests, religious and nuns, and the highest dignitaries of the Church. When the executioners whipped Him, Jesus was silent and looked away; but when the consecrated souls flogged Him, His eyes closed and from His mouth came a repressed but terribly painful groan. Later, I received the grace to know in detail the enormous wickedness of those ungrateful souls: “This is a torture worse than My death”
The priests (and not just the pedophile ones) were there that Friday in Jerusalem to scourge the Lamb. And the Eternal Lamb, whose Person exists outside time, saw them one by one.
God detests the lukewarm but cannot resist the humble, and even in the diary, He celebrates the Ishmaels of all times:
- “Where there is pride, I am not there. To proud souls, I do not grant graces, but I also take away those I have given in the past. Although My greatness is inconceivable, I love to have intimate relationships with the little ones. The meek and humble souls and the souls of children are the most like Me. These are the ones who sustained Me in the bitter agony on the cross. They are the angels of the earth who stand guard at My altars. On them, I bestow My graces full torrents. Because only humble souls I grant full trust in My Goodness.”
“The greatness of a person measures how much they have detached from themselves” (Albert Einstein). The Blessed Virgin, humility made creature, confirms Einstein’s words:
- “God always humbles those who feel great. The true greatness of a soul consists in loving God, humbling oneself before Him, and completely forgetting oneself.”
But Christ not only exalts the humble and the children. He also exalts the pagans who have sincerely sought and seek the truth:
- “Bring Me the pagans and those who do not yet know Me. I also thought of them in My bitter Passion and their (future) zeal consoled My Heart.”
Men like Aristotle, Cicero, Einstein, great artists like Homer, and spiritual masters like the great Hindu teachers, Buddha, Lao-Tze, Confucius, Gandhi—even if not Christian—are certainly in His eternal embrace to participate in His Glory. We will not be in the eternal embrace of the incarnate Word if we are baptized. We will be in His embrace if we have followed our conscience, if we do not call good evil and evil good, and if we believe in His Forgiveness at the extreme hour.
To carry out Christ's project, Faustina had to endure countless accusations of “madness” from her fellow sisters. In the hardest moments, only the words of the Lord lifted her from discouragement:
- “Listen, My daughter, all works that arise by My will must pass through great sufferings. But consider whether there has ever been any work exposed to greater obstacles than the work carried out directly by Me: Redemption. Do not pay much attention to the murmurs around you. Let everyone judge you as they please. Let them even take away what belongs to you: esteem, a good name. Your spirit must be superior to all of this. Whatever opponent can only harm you as much as I will allow. Whether souls know it or not, whether they want it or not, they can only do what I allow them.”
A suffering lasted until death:
- “When I was agonizing on the cross, I did not think of Myself, but of sinners, and I prayed to My Father for them. I want your last moments to be completely like Mine. One is the price with which souls are redeemed, and this price is suffering united to My suffering on the cross. Pure love understands these words; carnal love will never comprehend them. Therefore you will accept all sufferings with love. Do not grieve if your heart often feels repugnance and aversion for this sacrifice. The power of this sacrifice resides entirely in the will. Therefore these contrary feelings not only do not diminish this sacrifice in My eyes but make it greater. Know that your body and soul will often be in the fire. Even if at some hours you do not feel Me, yet I will be beside you. Do not fear, My grace will be with you... SOON I WILL MANIFEST MY OMNIPOTENCE IN YOU AND SOON ALL WILL CALL YOU SAINT.”
A prophecy fully realized in April 2000, when John Paul II canonized the great mystic.
And we cannot fail to mention another prophecy:
- “I LOVE POLAND IN A SPECIAL WAY (...). FROM IT WILL COME THE SPARK THAT WILL PREPARE THE WORLD FOR MY FINAL COMING.”
A spark dressed in white that contributed to dismantling communism and thundering against consumerist hedonism and the disregard for human life.
To conclude, let us ask: why did the Lord so much want to make known through Faustina the enormity and universality of His Goodness? He reveals it to us Himself:
- “This is a sign for the last times, after which will come the day of justice. Before coming as a just Judge, I come as a King of Mercy. Before that day arrives, this sign will be given to men: all light in the sky will be extinguished, and there will be great darkness over the whole earth. At that point, the sign of the Cross will appear in the sky, and from the holes, where My feet and hands were nailed, great lights will come forth that will illuminate the earth for some time. This will happen shortly before the end. Make known to the world My inconceivable Mercy, for the dreadful day is near, the day of My justice. Unhappy are those who do not listen to what you write. You will invoke My Mercy when it is too late!”
They sound like the words of the Blessed Virgin at Medjugorje.
The Lord could not have said and done more. Now it is up to us. Before it is too late. The moral devastation of the last 50 years is seen by all. But if we want to play blind…
The purpose of the diary is not to instill fear. The purpose is to open the hearts of souls to hope:
- “To obtain My Mercy, you do not need to make pilgrimages to distant lands, nor celebrate solemn external rites. It is enough to place yourself in faith at the feet of one of My representatives and confess to him your misery. I will never reject a heart that humbles itself. Tell the suffering soul to kneel and surrender to My merciful Heart. And I will fill it with peace.”
Christ is waiting for you.
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