The other Saint of Divine Mercy: Blessed Michał Sopoćko

When we think about the Divine Mercy image, novena, or chaplet, it’s hard not to think about two great saints as well. Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938) was a Polish religious sister and mystic whose diary describes her visions involving Divine Mercy. Saint John Paul II (1920-2005) instituted the feast of Divine Mercy, following the instructions in Faustina’s diary, after he had become pope.

But, for many decades after Faustina’s death in Poland, it was a priest, Blessed Michał Sopoćko, who kept this devotion alive and in the hearts of Catholics all over the world.

When Michał was born in 1888, his hometown was known as Juszewszczyzna, Russia (now Nowosady, Poland). His family was persecuted by the czarist authorities both because they were Polish and because they were Catholic. Michał recognized God’s call to the priesthood; he was ordained in 1914, serving as a parish priest until 1918. He then became a military chaplain and even accompanied Polish soldiers on the front lines during a war with Russia. He later entered the seminary for advanced studies and completed a doctorate in theology.

Michał was clearly an intelligent, hard-working priest, eventually serving as spiritual director to seminarians, regional coordinator for military chaplains, rector of a parish, and head of a theology department. In 1933, he was asked to add another responsibility to his priestly life, serving as the confessor and spiritual director to the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in the city of Vilnius.

That’s when he met an unusually gifted and devout woman: Maria Faustina Kowalska. Sister Faustina had been receiving visions of our Lord for some time, visions in which Jesus appeared to her and insisted that she share a message of God’s love and mercy with the entire world. Her superiors and confessors didn’t believe her, with the single exception of Jesuit priest Joseph Andrasz. Struggling to understand these messages, discouraged by those around her, and limited by her own lack of education, Sister Faustina humbly begged our Lord to send her a spiritual director who could help her discern God’s will. When she saw Father Michał Sopoćko for the first time, the voice in her soul told her that he was the one.

Father Sopoćko listened to Faustina and evaluated her mystical experiences carefully. He asked her to keep a written journal of what she experienced in her relationship with the Lord, which she obediently did. He helped her find an artist, Eugeniusz Kazimirowski, to paint an image of Jesus Christ according to the vision she had seen. He did not scoff at her inspiration to establish a new religious congregation, although he encouraged her to remain in her own congregation for various reasons. He supported her through spiritual direction as she suffered from debilitating ill health, ridicule from other sisters, and spiritual difficulties.

Demonstrating that even saints need spiritual direction, Faustina destroyed her earliest journal at one point when an angel appeared to her and told her to burn her diary, proving Saint Paul’s admonition (2 Cor 11:14) that Satan can even disguise himself as an angel to mislead us. Fortunately, Faustina never disobeyed Father Sopoćko again, and, at the time of her death in 1938, she left behind 700 handwritten pages describing her experiences, visions, and spiritual reflections.

As a priest, Father Sopoćko was assigned various tasks over the years following Faustina’s death. During World War II, he secretly supported Polish Jews, who were constantly being persecuted under the Nazis, and he narrowly escaped arrest and imprisonment for doing so. After the war, he served as a seminary professor and taught many subjects. But the devotion that Faustina described, now known as devotion to the Divine Mercy, influenced the rest of Father Sopoćko’s life.

Not only did a love of God’s mercy inspire his own priestly service, he promoted the devotion to others. He organized the printing of prayers and litanies, including the now-famous Divine Mercy chaplet and novena. He made sure the Divine Mercy image painted by Kazimirowski was publicly displayed on the Sunday after Easter, and he preached about its meaning. There were 150 Divine Mercy centers in Poland just thirteen years after Sister Faustina’s death, and he wrote articles about God’s mercy in Polish magazines for decades. He passed on Divine Mercy materials to other priests, including a Marian priest who was the first one to bring the devotion to the US. He remembered Faustina’s insistence about founding a new religious congregation and wrote the constitution for what is now the Congregation of the Sisters of the Divine Mercy.

But he also suffered innumerable setbacks and constant ridicule for promoting this message. Because of Sister Faustina’s lack of education, early translations of her diary were misleading, and her writings were banned by the Holy Office (now called the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) in 1959. Although the image and the associated devotions—separate from Faustina’s diary—were even encouraged by Popes Pius XI and Pius XII, it wasn’t until 1978, several months before Karol Wojtyła became pope, that the prohibition was lifted.

Michał Sopoćko died on February 15, 1975, just a few years shy of the total vindication of Saint Faustina’s writings, after having spent a lifetime promoting devotion to God’s mercy. He was declared a blessed on September 28, 2008 in Bialystok, Poland, as a result of his own holy life.

Today, it is difficult to find Blessed Michał’s writings in English, while information about Saint Faustina has exploded all over the world. There are now translations of her diary available in at least twenty languages, biographies and films about her life, different versions of the Divine Mercy image, and many devotional books explaining the concept of Divine Mercy.

But it is hard to imagine Blessed Michał being jealous about the fact that his work is almost completely forgotten today. After all, he always knew that his life’s work involved promoting an awareness and love for God and His Mercy, not about promoting Michał Sopoćko.

However, on his feast day, February 15th, we can thank God for Blessed Michał. He was, in some ways, like a relay race runner, taking the baton of Divine Mercy from one saint—Saint Faustina—carrying it his whole life long—and placing it in the hands of another saint—Saint John Paul II. Those of us who pray the Divine Mercy chaplet at 3 pm each day owe a debt of gratitude to Saint Faustina for her visions and Saint John Paul for his leadership. But we should also give thanks to the persistence of Blessed Michał Sopoćko.

Update: I am delighted to learn that a new collection of Bl. Michal Sopocko’s writings in English has been released by the Divine Mercy Shrine of Stockbridge, MA. Find out more about God’s Amazing Mercy here.