"I have come to this point only by the grace of God. 
The era of God's Divine Mercy."

I became a member of a twelve step program called Overeaters Anonymous in 1985. I was a lukewarm Catholic who found the New Age interesting. The 12 step program is based on God and I believed that. but somehow I was taken in by Shirley MacLaine's and her New Age beliefs. 

While working on my moral inventory (which would have not been necessary if I had been receiving the Sacrament of Reconciliation) and studying the Big Book by Bill Wilson he stated that if we work the twelve steps we would become stronger in our religion. Oh how I longed for that to happen. 

My progress in OA was very slow. I was convinced that I needed to go into rehab so I went into the program at a hospital in Orlando, Florida. My eating was out of control. There, through group therapy, I got in touch with my character defects by getting honest feedback from the other patients and also with the help of role playing. Control was a big part of my problem. I wondered how to get away from that since it was a survival issue most of my life. I spent 40 years in active nursing, most of which were in an administrative capacity.

That was a big step in knowing what contributed to the situation that I was in. But now what? 
In the 28 day program I learned that I was a food addict, mostly to carbohydrates and sugar. I continued to work the 12 step program and my weight was reasonably under control. That took care of the physical and emotional, but what about the Spiritual?

A few days later my friend Sharon and I attended another friend's Swearing In ceremony as an elected judge. During the reception Sharon introduced me to a friend of hers whose name is Eugene. Since the reception was so crowded and we had a lot to talk about, we left the court house and went to a local restaurant.

Eugene carried a Bible with him. We got into deep discussions about the Scourge of Abortion and the Sacraments of the Catholic Church. Sharon is Protestant but always open to hear about Catholicism. In fact she said something that inspired me. She said that the only ones she knows in the program who have real recovery are Catholic.

Eugene began to quiz me. Do you read the Bible? Do you go to frequent Confession? Do you receive the Eucharist daily at Mass? I realized how spiritually bankrupt I was. He reminded me of the blessings we get with the sacrament of Reconciliation. I was only fulfilling my Easter Duty so that I would not be automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church. I did miss a few Sundays of Mass but I confessed that because I feared Hell.

This was the beginning of my conversion. I knew that I lost my faith and it wouldn't be easy to have that great gift of Faith restored. Being a member of the Sodality a long time ago I believed that the Blessed Mother would help lead me to her son if I pleaded with her. I began to pray the rosary on my knees instead of in bed because I would drop off to sleep easily. I began to go to daily Mass and frequent Confession. It was hard but I was being led each step of the way by Our Lady.

I received information in the mail about the the second Medjugorje conference to be held at the David Lawrence Convention Center, downtown Pittsburgh.

There a priest spoke about St. Louis de Montfort who wrote books in the early 1700's on The Consecration to Jesus through Mary. I was inspired. I had not been to Medjugorje. I knew that after I did the necessary 33 day preparation I would complete the last day of the Consecration on the feast of the Immaculate Conception which occurs on December 8, and I wanted to do that in Medjugorje.

I was truly excited because I knew that Our Lady is leading me to her son. I have finally surrendered and admitted that I was powerless, my life has become unmanageable and only God could help me.

The 33 day preparation must be done before one of Our Lady's feast days. The prayers and scripture readings are written up for each day in the book "Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary". The book "True Devotion to Mary" is also read during this period. At the conference we were told that when Our Holy Father worked in the mines he carried one of these books in his back pocket. That information made my heart swell with love for him.

I must back up, I just realized that this happened in November '93 when I began the preparation. I have more to say about my trip to the Vatican for Blessed Faustina's beatification in April, 1993.

While I was reading the Diary of Sister M. Faustina I became very interested in going to Rome for her beatification. In the meantime my youngest child Nina who was working in Slovakia as a political advisor to the Prime Minister Jan Charnagursky, called me and asked me if I was interested in meeting her in Rome for Holy Week. I was ecstatic. I talked to my husband who was not yet retired and he gave me his support, assuring me that he would not mind being alone for Easter. He was not interested in going.

The Beatification of Sister Faustina

I knew that the Beatification would take place on Mercy Sunday which is the Sunday after Easter. Now, I needed to find a group that was going to the Beatification. I called all that I knew of including Father John Kozak from the diocese who handles Pilgrimages. He said that none were planned. I finally reached Queen of Peace tours in Los Angeles, and asked if I could buy the land tour only because I would already be in Rome. This was then arranged.

My daughter Nina, who worked in Europe, asked me to join her for Holy Week. This was a great plan because then I would be there for Mercy Sunday. 

I was somewhat nervous, in fact very nervous, since just a year or so before that there was a terrorism incident at the airport. Prayers to Our Lady did bring me peace and the airport was calm and quiet. I didn't see any police with machine guns as were reported a year before.

The Hotel owner met me outside with a chauffeur driven limousine. This was a great service which made me feel secure. The hotel was just one block from Vatican City.

I met Nina there and we went scouting the city, enjoying the scenery. There were beautiful displays of Easter Candy which are quite different than ours. They were very creative and colorful as well as the flower arrangements and candies.

It was nice to see Mother Teresa's sisters walking the street. We passed her convent as we were heading for the entrance to The Eternal City.

We immediately walked through the square to examine St. Peter's Basilica which is awesome. Next we went to the Vatican gift shop which is located alongside the basilica.

Mercy Sunday

My devotion to then Sister Faustina began five years earlier. My mother Agnes Stasny was a resident at a personal care home in Tarentum, Pennsylvania. I visited her in the afternoons and took her along with her roommate and anyone else interested into the lounge to watch EWTN to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. I never heard of it before. This turned out to be a regular activity.

I began to pray The chaplet of The Divine Mercy, daily, not just the days I visited my mother. In February of '93, I bought the diary of then Sister M. Faustina Kowalska, titled Divine Mercy In My Soul.

The devotional practices revealed though Blessed Faustina were given to us as "vessels of mercy" through which God's love can be poured out upon the world, but they are not sufficient unto themselves. It's not enough for us to hang The Divine Mercy image in our homes, pray the chaplet every day at three o'clock and receive Holy Communion on the first Sunday after Easter. WE also have to show mercy to our neighbors. Putting mercy into action is not an option of the Divine Mercy Devotion; It's a requirement!

How strongly Our lord speaks about this to Blessed Faustina.

"I demand from you deeds of mercy which are to arise out of love for me. You are to show mercy to your neighbors always and everywhere. You must not shrink from this or try to excuse yourself from it." (742).*

>From the diary of this young Polish nun, a special devotion to the mercy of God is spreading throughout the world.

The message is nothing new, just a reminder what the Church has always taught: that God is merciful and forgiving and that we, too, must show mercy and forgiveness.

The history of the origin and dissemination of the Divine Mercy Message and Devotion throughout the world makes for great reading----extraordinary visions and revelations, miraculous answers o prayer, a dramatic escape from war-torn Poland, a temporary ban by the Church, and strong support from Pope John Paul II, who may well go down in history as the "Mercy Pope."

The writings of Blessed Faustina Kowalska, an uneducated nun from the Congregation of Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Poland are the source of the message and devotion.

In the l930's in obedience to her spiritual director Father Michael Sopocko, Sister Faustina wrote the diary of some 600 pages recording the revelations she was receiving about God's mercy.

Even before her death in 1938, the devotion to the Divine Mercy as revealed in this diary had begun to spread. During the tragic war years of 1939-1945 this devotion grew in strength as people throughout Poland and Lithuania turned to the merciful Savior for comfort and hope.

In 1941, the devotion was brought to the USA from Poland by Father Joseph Jarzebowski, a member of the Congregation of Marians of the Immaculate Conception. Father Jarzebowski had at first been skeptical about the great graces received by those who entrusted themselves to The Divine Mercy. But, in the spring of 1940, he vowed that he were able to safely reach his fellow Marians in America, he would spend the rest of his life spreading the Divine mercy message and Devotion.

After an extraordinary journey from Poland into Lithuania, then across Russia and Siberia to Vladivostok, and from there to Japan, he arrived on American soil a year later. True to his vow. he immediately began distributing about the message and devotion, with the help of the Felician Sisters in Michigan and Connecticut.His Marian confreres soon became intensely involved as well. After several years of this activity out of Washington DC, they established in 1944 the "Mercy of God Apostolate" on Eden Hill in Stockbridge, MA, new home of the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy and the Marian Helpers Center, a modern, religious publishing house that has become the international center for the Divine Mercy Devotion. By 1953 some 25 million pieces of Divine Mercy literature had been distributed around the world.

Then in 1958 and 1959, Sister Faustina"s prophecy about the apparent destruction of the Divine Mercy work began to be fulfilled. The Holy See, having received erroneous and confusing translations of Diary entries which it was unable to verify due to existing political conditions, forbade the spreading of the Divine Mercy Devotion in the forms proposed by Sister Faustina's writings.

During the period of the ban, the Marians continued to spread devotion to God's mercy, but, in obedience to Rome, they based the message and devotion regarding Divine Mercy on Sacred Scripture, the Liturgy, the teachings of the church, and Our Lady's revelations at Fatima.

Twenty years later (in 1978), the ban was completely lifted, thanks to the intervention of the Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla (now the Pope John Paul ll). Through his efforts, an Informative Process relating to the life and virtues of Sister Faustina was begun in 1965. Its successful outcome led to the inauguration of her Beatification Cause in 1968.

In a new "Notification" on April 15, 1978, the Sacred Congregation for the doctrine of faith, having reviewed many original documents that could not be made available to it in 1959 reversed it's earlier decision and declared the 1959 prohibition "no longer binding."

Six months later, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla became Pope John Paul ll.

Thus in 1979--with the local Bishop's permission---the Marians resumed their work of spreading the Divine Mercy Devotion in forms proposed by Sister Faustina. The response from laity, priests and bishops all offer the world has been overwhelming, and the devotion has grown faster than anyone ever expected.

One of the reasons for this is the continued support of the Holy Father. IN 1981, he published an encyclical letter entitled "Dives in Misericordia" (Rich in Mercy), in which he speaks of Christ as the "incarnation of mercy---the inexhaustible source of mercy" He goes on to emphasize that "Christ's messianic program, the program of mercy" must become "the program of His people, the program of the Church".

Throughout the encyclical, the Holy Father stress that the Church--especially in our modern times--has the "right and the duty" to "profess and proclaim God's mercy," to introduce it and make it incarnate" in the lives of all people "to call upon the mercy of God," imploring it for the whole world.

A year after publishing Rich In Mercy, the pope visited the Shrine of Merciful Love in Collevalenza, Italy, during his first pilgrimage outside Rome after the attempt on his life. There he reaffirmed the importance of the message of mercy and explained that, from the very beginning of his ministry in Rome he has considered the message his "special task," assigned to him by God "in the present situation of man, the Church of the world."

It was not a glamorous prospect. Her entire life, in imitation of Christ's was to be a sacrifice--a life lived for others. AT the divine Lord's request, she willingly offered her personal sufferings in union with Him to atone for sins of others; and by writing about God's mercy, she was to encourage others to trust in Him and thus prepare the world for His coming again.

Convinced of her own unworthiness and terrified at the thought of trying to write anything, she nonetheless began keeping a diary in 1934 in obedience to the express wishes of her spiritual director, and then of Our Lord Himself. For four years she recorded divine revelations and mystical experiences, together with her own inmost thoughts, insights and prayers. The result is a book of some 600 printed pages that, in simple language, repeats and clarifies the gospel story of God's love for His people, emphasizing, above all, the need to trust in His loving action in all the aspects of our lives.

It also reveals an extraordinary example of how to respond to God's mercy and manifest it to others.

Blessed Faustina's spiritual life was based on deep humility, purity of intention, and loving obedience to the will of God in imitation of the virtues of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Her special devotion to Mary Immaculate and to the sacraments of Eucharist and Reconciliation gave her the strength to bear all her sufferings as an offering to God on behalf of the Church and those in special need, especially great sinners and the dying. She wrote and suffered in secret, with only her spiritual director and some of her superiors aware that anything special was taking place in her life. After her death from tuberculosis in 1938, even her closest associates were amazed as they began to discover what great sufferings and deep mystical experiences had been given to this sister of theirs, who had always been so cheerful and humble. She had taken deeply into her heart God's gospel command to "be merciful even as your heavenly Father is merciful" as well as her confessor's directive that she should act in such a way that everyone who came in contact with her would go away joyful.

The message of mercy that Sister Faustina received is now being spread throughout the world; she has been recognized by the Church as "Blessed" and her diary, Divine Mercy in My Soul, has become the handbook for devotion to The Divine Mercy. She would not have been surprised, for she had been told that the message of God's mercy would spread through her writings for the great benefit of souls.

In her prophetic statement she had declared:
"I feel certain that my mission will not come to an end upon my death, but will begin. O doubting souls, I will draw aside for you the veils of heaven to convince you of God's goodness".