The Sanctuary of the Divine Mercy, a contemporary Roman Catholic shrine on the outskirts of Cracow, is growing into a pilgrimage destination that could rival Lourdes or Fatima. It is associated with Saint Faustina (Faustyna Kowalska), a mystic who died before the war in Cracow at the age of 33, after a life spent in outward obscurity.

The sanctuary can be reached by tram. From the tram stop, after passing through the pedestrian tunnel and the charming Borek Falecki train station (built on a curve), it is only a short walk up the gentle hill to the sanctuary. The tower offers a fine panoramic view. Two elevators carry sightseers to the viewing deck 15 stories above the entrance and 17 stories above ground level. An enclosed viewing deck, on two levels, offers a 360-degree view.

The new part of the sanctuary includes the basilica with its tower and several side chapels, a pilgrimage center featuring a restaurant, and a mini shopping center selling devotional items. The groundbreaking ceremony took place only in 1999, but the main part of the basilica was ready  for a visit by Pope John Paul II in 2002.

A peaceful grove of mature trees and a small votive chapel stand next to the original nineteenth-century building where the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy continue to run their shelter and institution for young women. There are benches among the trees in this part of the grounds.

The older building contains the sisters' original chapel. This place of devotion is in fact the reason for the new basilica and the world-wide interest in Lagiewniki. The chapel contains the tomb of St. Faustina Kowalska and the painting of Jesus, based upon a vision she experienced, that has become familiar around the world. 

Faustyna (to use the Polish spelling of her name) Kowalska was born in the small country town of Glogowiec, Poland, in 1905. She died of tuberculosis in Cracow in 1938. At 19, having experienced visions and defied her parents, she traveled to Warsaw and, with difficulty, won admission to the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. Her lack of education consigned her to menial work in the order, and she shuffled around its convents before arriving at Lagiewniki on the outskirts of Cracow. 

Her visions continued and she recorded them in a diary of which it has been said that every sentence contains at least one mistake in spelling or grammar. One Catholic biography records that "Sister Mary Faustina was blessed with many graces, including visions, revelations, wounds of the stigmata (hidden from all but her), sharing in the Passion of the Lord, bilocation, the ability to read of human souls, prophecy, and mystical engagement and marriage." She also suffered the derision of her fellow sisters. However, her confessor while she was at a convent in Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), Father Michal Sopocko, took her seriously and commissioned a painting of Jesus as He appeared to her in a vision on February 22, 1931, when He also directed her to have just such a painting made. Faustina records that Jesus told her: "The soul that venerates this image will never die." 

The painting that now stands above Faustina's burial place in the Lagiewniki chapel, and that has been reproduced around the world, is in fact a second version, painted in 1947 by Adolf Hyla (the first version remains in Vilnius and is venerated there). 

Faustina overcame great difficulties to become a nun, and never rose above the lowest category ("sisters of the second choir") within her order. Yet the painting, and Father Sopocko's publication of the diary she had kept, contributed to the rise of a new devotional movement. At his own expense, Father Sopocko printed and distributed directions for reciting the Chaplet of Mercy, a devotion to be said each day at 3:00 PM (the hour of Christ's death on the Cross), acknowledging the sins of the whole world and beseeching the mercy that Christ promised in a vision that Faustina experienced in 1935. In that vision, Faustina saw an angel "who was about to strike the earth, and especially a particular city, with divine punishment." The Divine Anger, Faustina recorded, was so great that her "plea [for mercy] was nothing." Yet she kept praying until she saw a vision of the Holy Trinity and received the words of the Chaplet. 

As if intent upon continuing the series of difficulties and rejection that Faustina suffered in the earthly life, the Church refused to sanction the publication of her diary and the devotions it contained. In 1958, a Vatican commission condemned the cult of devotion to the Divine Mercy, probably on the grounds that Faustina's poor spelling and grammar allegedly made the Diary incoherent. 

As it happened, however, a young man named Karol Wojtyla walked near the Lagiewniki site every day on his way to perform slave labor at the nearby Solvay plant under German occupation during the Second World War. The idea of Divine Mercy being required to stave off Divine Anger at a sinful world would not have been uncongenial to this eyewitness to many of the worst horrors of the twentieth century. In November 1980, as John Paul II, he dedicated the encyclical Dives in misericordia to the importance of mercy in a world under threat not only from Cold War nuclear arsenals but also from poverty, indifference, aggressive war, and the use of information technology in social control. John Paul II convened a new commission to examine Faustina's Diary. Rather than marking it down for grammar and spelling, the experts concentrated on its religious message, and found nothing heretical. This opened the door for Faustina's beatification in 1993 and her canonization on Mercy Sunday, April 30, 2000. 
 

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