Why is the Diary of Saint Sister Faustina Kowalska still unknown to Polonia and other countries?

Diary of Saint Sister Faustina Kowalska still unknown to Polonia and the people of Western Europe and USA.

i know plenty about her. However, i doubt that most Polish folk are aware that the image of Christ with the shafts of red and blue light, are down to Faustina. An image that can be seen every day.

I would like to ask about the reasons for this???

The image in the painting may be associated more with the artist or its title more than Faustina, who first saw it in her mind.

Divine Mercy and Saint Faustina are spoken about.... Some churchgoers will be able to give you a good biography....

Maybe you are an exception after all? Faustina Kowalska seems to be unknown even in her native Poland...

I wonder why you think that? She's very well-known here and has been for many years.

There are 100 million followers worldwide of her 'Divine Mercy' devotion and she has a Major Shrine at the Basilica of Divine Mercy down south.

Thanks for the answer. I have heard Pope Francis saying many times that 2016 is the year of Divine Mercy.

so why doesn't he even mention the diary written by the Polish nun Kowalska? or even her name?

I have heard Polish priests speaking about Mercy all the time, but never do they mention F. Kowalska or her Diary or priest Sopocko. I was just wondering if this is some kind of conspiracy.

No. What sort of a conspiracy do you mean? Cui bono?.

The concept of mercy is a very broad one, certainly not confined to religions and the RC devotion to the Divine Mercy is much much bigger than Sister Faustyna's particular devotion.

well. they -- Pope Francis and his priests keep talking about Mercy without mentioning Gods Justice.. if they said something about the Diary or F. Kowalska, certainly more people would read the her Diary...you cant talk about Mercy without mentioning Justice can you?

The concepts can be linked but are certainly separate. The Pope certainly chooses his words very carefully and on the subject of mercy they are certainly worth listening to.

Sister Faustyna's book is promoted heavily by her followers and is available very easily and translated into many languages. It isn't as if it's a secret - after all, she was canonised recently.

Pol Attorney, please, please stop with the conspiracy stuff. You're perpetuating a most unfortunate Polish stereotype. Time to leave that stuff behind. As for Sr Faustina, here's my own experience. Ten years ago in Warsaw a neighbour, a young man in his early 30s I'd say, asked me if I knew about her and gave me a little pamphlet. A couple of years after that my mother in Ireland was given a similar piece of literature. Then about 3 years ago when I was standing in a train station in Dublin an Indian lady approached me and handed me a little card with the Hour of Divine Mercy prayer on it. So I'd say that she is known both in and outside of Poland by many practising Catholics. You have to remember that she's competing for attention with thousands of other saints, many with a long established fan base!

Hmm what that would be?


Neither is their duty to stress that she is Polish! If somebody is interested he can learn it no problem.

Ah you know what I mean Irony. Poles tend to have a suspicious nature, they can be a bit paranoid and they see conspiracies and plots everywhere. I imagine it's a remnant of the Communist era when you had to be very careful about what you said to whom. Agents were everywhere at a low very low level.

Mr Atch (have to stop calling him 'my husband', sounds too much like the Queen talking about Prince Philip, you know 'my husband and I') has told me quite a few tales about some of the strangeness of everyday life in the Poland of his childhood. For example he says that people were wary about spending too much in a single shop in case the shopkeeper was an agent and would wonder where they got the money from and report 'Mr So-and-So bought 2 kilos of pork today and he usually buys sausages'. It sounds ridiculous I know but......look, I don't need to tell you, I know you must have watched Alternatywy 4. There were plenty of Stanisław Anioł types around.

No I don't Tach, that Poles tend to be a tad suspicious towards strangers is a fact not a Polish stereotype. You make it sounds as if somewhere out there existed some kind of a stereotype I actually never heard about and that made me curios.

No, that's an exaggeration on the part of Mr Atch. He tries to impress you telling you how brave he was living in a country full of agents at every corner, whereas you could only watch James Bond on TV sitting comfortably on your sofa in the UK or anywhere else in the "rotten" West. The real problem of Poland at that time was that you could see very little pork or sausages in the shops with significant number of customers cruising the town and being ready to buy as much as they can carry if the shop was prepared to sell something to them.

A cartoon in an Austrian newspaper of 1981 nicely depicted those various kinds of imbalances of the time in Eastern and Central Europe. Crowds of Polish people leaving the country get out of the Warsaw-Vienna express train arriving in the Austrian capital. On seeing this one Austrian railway worker says to another: there must have occured some terrible mistake - we had asked for more coal, not people, to be brought in from Poland!

"Poles tend to have a suspicious nature, they can be a bit paranoid and they see conspiracies and plots everywhere"

This is true of me, I did well running a business, I was always suspicious and I saw many conspiracies before they had a chance to develop into something that would hurt me or my employees.

I would never generalize and say that these are Polish traits, damn useful if you don't want to get ripped off tho.

So, are you trying to tell me that there are no conspiracies in business, Church or politics in today's world? Is this so?


Not really. Faustina IS in fact the most important Saint because of the message conveyed to her by Jesus. I'm sure that not many people actually read her diary which has 500 pages..

That's actually a staggering comment.

Many saints (and other people) claim to have received messages from their deity. Leaving aside doctrinal points like discernment, it's quite amazing to see someone suggest that one particular one is "in fact the most important Saint".

What about all the others?

In XX/XXI century there is no other Saint who received from Jesus this type of Message of God's mercy (or any other message which would be equally important).

Certainly it DOES MEAN something that God decided to convey this message of hope to a Polish nun...this IS in fact a great honor for Poland and its people..

It's a pity that Polish priests fail to mention the nun's name or her book or the teachings of Saint JP II. It's quite clear that masonry has managed to infiltrate even the Polish catholic church.

what's next now? they will get rid of Transubstantiation during Holy Mass??? i can see one BIG conspiracy here...

Plenty of religious figures claim to have received messages. All are unique.


I wonder why you think that? It simply isn't true.


Freemasonry has no interest in religious organisations.


What conspiracy? None of the things you've mentioned are even 1% correct.

And still do. There's the ongoing apparations at Medjugorje, for instance.

That one's a problem. The church dislikes the Medugorje hoax, not least due to the UFO stuff, however it can't easily stop people going there without declaring it officially false (the church's position is that it's a non constat or not proven to be supernatural) and the place is an absolute money spinner. Garabandal is much the same and the Bayside apparitions even worse.

Sister Faustyna's followers do include some people on the fringes of the church however her writings are mostly innocuous
.

Medjugorje is horrific. I went there a couple of years back, and it was about as bad as it gets - the whole town was all about money, money, money and the entire place was incredibly kitsch. The only good thing was that car parking was free outside the ridiculously large (for the size of the town) church. When you read into the whole story, it's pretty obvious what happened and how easy it was to create the entire hoax. The Vatican were supposed to make a judgement last summer, but nothing materialised. The worst for me was watching some very clearly mentally ill guy getting dragged towards the church - he clearly needed hospital treatment, not religion.

Always meant to go back and watch one of the apparitions live, because they're still coming every day.

He's not twelve! And neither am I - do you know how he's impressed me? By being kind, generous, considerate, hard working, loyal and facing many challenges and personal difficulties with great courage and steadfastness. Anyway his mother and grandmother would tell you the same kind of stories. They're just chatting about the old days, not trying to impress anyone. Mr Atch actually laughs quite a bit about it and a lot of such stories are told with the tongue firmly in the cheek. He's just making a point about the general atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia that he remembers and considered normal. He says he wouldn't change anything about his childhood and he considers himself very lucky. How about sharing some of your own experiences? Everyday life in Communist Poland. It's not discussed much on this forum and it's an interesting subject.


Yes indeed. He tells me that once when they went into the shop there was nothing there but vinegar. Shelves and shelves of it. Now there's many things about that which are fascinating. Firstly, somebody supplied the shop with a huge consignment of vinegar, presumably so that they'd have at least something to sell, secondly the shop dutifully filled the shelves with it, which is quite ludicrous really. Why did they do that? Because they thought it looked better than empty shelves? Because they didn't have room in the stockroom?? Who knows.


That's your personal opinion which you're entitled to but it's a purely subjective view. It's also extremely simplistic.


It's harldy earth shattering now is it? All the message does is remind us of something that every Catholic already knows, or should. The message of God's mercy is very central to the Catholic and the Anglican faiths.

I always thought Feliksa Kozłowska was the more interesting figure. She founded the Mariavite movement (with women priests as well as monks and nuns who could marry). She also thought the church should be self-sufficient and didn't collect money from parishoners.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliksa_Koz%C5%82owska


I knew someone who went there by mistake (she didn't realize it was a pilgrimage until the voyage was well under way). The group was there a week and she had to spend all day every day in the middle of town with nothing except stores selling rosaries and pizza(!)

Added as an additional post because I ran out of editing time (a stupid feature of this site which is full of them)


I read an article in an anthropological journal that laid out the whole time line (while carefully remaining neutral about the central apparition experience). Short story: there was a conflict in the local structure of the church and local resistance to being absorbed into another dioces (or whatever). A local priest carried out an extreme evangelization effort with daily mass rosaries and the like and then the kids claimed to have the visions and he took that and ran with it. The children's supernatural experience (real or imagined) was used by local authorities to forestall their own redundancy.

Life in communist Poland wasn't as bad as you may think. I attended a polish primary school in the 80s and it was the best time of my life (lots of friends, girls and boys). The best people i have met in my life and I lived in different countries, both rich and poor.

Poland always remained Polish and Catholic despite harsh communist persecution of priests and catholics, killings, etc. there was a lot of poverty in communist Poland , but there is even more poverty NOW! ironically, the more communists persecuted the people and the church, the more followers the Church got. Now the communists/masons got clever -- they gave the Poles absolute freedom and some money and the Churches are empty, really empty... The war continues...in a different form..

Neither capitalism nor communism solves peoples problems (social, economic, etc.). These are just 2 different ways of fooling the masses by the corporate/masonic elitists. Only the enthronement of Jesus Christ as the king of Poland (and possibly other nations in Europe) will start a new era of peace and economic security for all nations.


You do realize that there are agents everywhere even now both in eastern and western europe, usa, Russia and china ?

Pretty much. Rural Hercegovina was (and still is) a pretty poor, tough place to live - these children were, to put it politely, not very well educated or travelled. It would've been obvious that once the benefits of their visions started coming in, they would have been 'encouraged' to continue, especially as it would have been a source of a lot of hard cash in the very economically difficult times of the 80's in Yugoslavia.

I've never visited any other Catholic shrines, but Medjugorje is incredibly odd.


One of the most absurd things I've ever read on PF, to be fair.

Oh really? You certainly don't know much about Polish history.

On April 1, 1656, in the middle of Swedish occupation of Poland, Polish king Jan Kazimierz with 3 bishops in Lvov enthroned Virgin Mary as the King/Queen of Poland. This act is fully legal and vaild up till now. Fully accepted by the Holy SEE. so who do you thimk Her son will be?

I've been to Medjugorje, too. At that time (1990s) the town was pretty well developed in the economic sense. I could even say it was slightly over-invested as there were several unfinished huge buildings on the outskirts of town. For someone searching religious experiences it was a good place to be in. For others, wine served to the meals at the small hotels was a pretty nice experience, too.

It was unwise to use the word "yougoslavian' in Medjugorje at that time. One shop-keeper whom we asked about something of that kind got really angry and started to shout Ne ma Yougoslavije! We left the shop in a hurry.

My wife who happened to briefly visit Medjugorje before that time when the place was nearly empty with no pilgrims going around swears she experienced one of the miracles of the place, she was watching the so-called "dancing Sun". The Sun was visibly and pretty quickly moving up and down to the utmost astonishment of her friends and herself. This was rather unusual as the Sun "moves" ("moving" is not necessarily true here since the time when our great compatriot Nicolaus Copernicus wstrzymał Słońce, ruszył Ziemię; polskie go wydało plemię) in the eclipse which is more of a horizontal than vertical nature. When I asked her if she drunk any wine before she saw that miracle, she swore she had not.