The Divine Mercy Chaplet: A History

Of all the devotions to emerge in the twentieth century, few have spread as swiftly or as widely as the Divine Mercy Chaplet. It was given to the Church through one of its most remarkable modern saints — a young Polish nun who, in a series of visions, received a message she herself described as "new" in its form but ancient in its substance: that God's greatest attribute is His mercy.

St. Faustina Kowalska

Helena Kowalska was born on August 25, 1905, in Głogowiec, a village in central Poland, the third of ten children in a poor farming family. At nineteen she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw, taking the name Maria Faustina.

From childhood she had experienced interior locutions and visions, but it was in the 1930s, while stationed at the congregation's house in Vilnius (then Poland), that her mystical life reached its fullest intensity. She began keeping a spiritual diary — a record of her interior life that would eventually run to nearly 700 pages — at the direction of her confessor, the Blessed Michał Sopoćko.

The Chaplet Is Given

On the night of September 13–14, 1935, St. Faustina recorded in her diary (entry 476) that she had been given a prayer by an interior vision. She saw an angel about to execute divine punishment upon the earth; she began to pray for mercy, using the words that were given her. The form was simple: on the large beads of the rosary, "Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son"; on the small beads, "For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world." The chaplet concluded with the three-fold "Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world."

Our Lord is recorded in her diary as promising remarkable graces to those who pray the chaplet — particularly for the dying and for those who pray it in the presence of the dying: "Whoever will recite it will receive great mercy at the hour of death." (Diary, 687)

Suppression and Restoration

St. Faustina died on October 5, 1938, at just thirty-three years of age. Within decades, the Holy Office in Rome issued a notification in 1959 discouraging the spread of the devotion, citing concerns about the accuracy of early translations of her diary. The devotion went underground — kept alive quietly in Poland, even under Communist suppression.

The rehabilitation came through the intervention of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, who personally reviewed the original Polish texts and found no theological error. When he became Pope John Paul II in 1978, one of his first acts in the field of devotion was to lift the prohibition. In 1980, his encyclical Dives in Misericordia — "Rich in Mercy" — gave theological grounding to the message of Divine Mercy.

Canonisation and Divine Mercy Sunday

On April 18, 1993, Pope John Paul II beatified Faustina Kowalska in Rome. Seven years later, on April 30, 2000, in one of the most significant acts of his pontificate, he canonised her and proclaimed the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday for the universal Church — fulfilling one of the specific requests Our Lord had made to St. Faustina in her diary.

Today the Divine Mercy Chaplet is prayed by millions worldwide. The image of Christ with the red and white rays — representing His Blood and water, the sources of sacramental life — hangs in Catholic homes and parishes from Warsaw to Manila to Buenos Aires. The chaplet has proved itself a devotion for the age: a prayer of total abandonment to the mercy of God in a century that needed it desperately.

You can pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet step-by-step in the Traditio Prayer Chapel.