Adding Trust to your Christmas list

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 13, 2014 | In Reviews

For those who love the Church’s revived emphasis on Divine mercy, a beautiful and touching Christmas gift would be the new coffee table book on St. Faustina, simply entitled Trust. Anyone familiar with the enormously popular Divine Mercy Chaplet will understand the importance of St. Faustina to our current appreciation of God’s mercy.

Born as Helen Kowalska in 1905, in a Poland that had been wiped off the map, St. Faustina accomplished a great work in a very short life. She died in 1938, and was canonized by Pope St. John Paul II in 2000. Also in that year, the Pope established the Feast of the Divine Mercy, as requested by Our Lord through St. Faustina, to be celebrated on the first Sunday after Easter. Since then, a renewed appreciation of God’s mercy has rippled through the Church.

This beautiful book was written by Grzegorz Górny with photography by Janusz Rosikon, and published in English by Ignatius Press. It covers St. Faustina’s life, vocation, suffering, and mystical experiences; her message, its acceptance by the Church, her beatification and canonization; the entrustment of the world to Divine Mercy by Pope St. John Paul II, and a consideration of why St. Faustina described the Sacrament of Penance as the Tribunal of Mercy.

The sample page scanned at right shows Tumsk Hill and Plock Cathedral in the Polish town of Plock. Sr. Faustina attended important Church celebrations there in the early 1930s while preparing for her final vows in the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. This is typical of the combination of photography, captions and text which adorn each of the book’s 325 beautiful pages.

While in Plock, Sr. Faustina’s battle with tuberculosis began, and she experienced private revelations in which Our Lord appeared as the King of Mercy. It was from these visions and locutions that she created what is now the popular Divine Mercy image of Christ, used around the world.

Trust is a slightly oversize, beautifully bound hardback book (roughly 8.2” wide by 10.4” high). The typography, photography and layout are all superb. But it is not just a pretty face. It delivers a rich historical, biographical and spiritual text while providing an intense visual sense of companionship with this remarkable apostle of mercy. As the subtitle suggests, this book really does help us to follow “in Saint Faustina’s Footsteps”.