Feast Day: OCTOBER 5
The visionary called the apostle of divine mercy deferred a religious calling to help her poor Polish family with her earnings as a housekeeper. She entered the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in 1925, serving in Krakow, Plock and Vilnius as a cook, gardener and porter until her early death from tuberculosis. After reporting her visions of Jesus as the divine mercy, she was ordered to have a psychiatric evaluation and the church posthumously condemned her 700-page diary. Her fellow Pole, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, championed her cause and had the ban removed after a retranslation; later, as Pope John Paul II, he canonized her and designated the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday churchwide.
