Trust

Trust: In Saint Faustina's Footsteps by Grzegorz Gorny and Janusz Rosikon, 325 pages

St Maria Faustina Kowalska was born Helena Kowalska in 1905 in a land that had once been Poland and would soon be Poland again.  She died just thirty-three years later, mere months before Poland was again removed from the map by a conspiracy of Russians and Germans.  Throughout her life, she claimed to have seen visions of Jesus Christ, who commanded her to disseminate a devotion to His Divine Mercy, but at the time of her death these visions were barely known outside of a few Polish priestly circles already endangered by the genocidal Nazi and Communist ideologies descending upon Eastern Europe.  Just as discouraging, the Church hierarchy, both in Rome and in Poland itself, viewed the devotion and the purported visions from which it derived with their usual skepticism.

Like most true visionaries (prominently St Margaret Mary Alacoque, St Bernadette Soubirous, and Sister Lucia), St Faustina's life was one of humility and self-effacement - she was nothing, the message was everything.  Eighty years after St Faustina's death, the Divine Mercy chaplet is perhaps the second most popular Catholic devotion in the world, surpassed only by the Rosary.  Such is St Faustina's stature that, when millions of Catholic young people gathered in Krakow in July of 2016 for World Youth Day, it was considered entirely appropriate to open the event with a procession of her relics alongside those of St John Paul II.

Trust follows the life of St Faustina from her materially impoverished but spiritually rich childhood, through her time working as a domestic servant scrimping and saving to acquire the dowry she would need to enter the convent, through her struggles with doubts and doubters, and then to her life beyond life, the spread of the Divine Mercy devotion worldwide and her own ascent to the altars of the universal Church.  The book is straightforward hagiography, with no pretense to objectivity, if objectivity is even possible in a case where the subject must be either a saint, a fraud, or a madwoman.  It is lavishly illustrated - the book would be less than half as long without the many photographs, often taking up an entire page.  The overall effect is less artistic than documentary, which has the fortunate effect of turning the book into a kind of printed pilgrimage.