Michigan Felician nun’s painting of Divine Mercy first in North America

LIVONIA, Mich. (CNS) — A talented nun, a devoted priest and a devotion that has since become a global phenomenon.

Sometimes, all it takes is a person with faith and a happenstance meeting to create history.

It was 1942, and Father Joseph Jarzebowski, sent on a mission from Poland to spread the word about a little-known sister named Faustina and her devotion to the Divine Mercy, arrived to give a seminar to the Felician Sisters in Plymouth, now Livonia.

It was then that a certain Sister Mary Fabia Szatkowska, inspired by the message of God’s love, painted the first North American version of the now world-famous image, the centerpiece of one of the fastest-growing lay devotions in the world.

When Sister Mary Fabia painted the iconic image, which now hangs discreetly in a quiet hallway at the Felician Sisters’ motherhouse in Livonia, nobody was thinking about the historical significance of the moment but about spreading the devotion.

“Sister Mary Fabia had a tremendous love for Our Lady, tremendous love of the Eucharist,” said Sister Mary DeSales Herman, a member of the Felician Franciscan Sisters in Livonia for 68 years. “Spirituality is a gift, and she had it. You want to express your devotion to Jesus. She had a tremendous love for Jesus, and could express her faith through her work.”

Many of Sister Mary Fabia’s paintings adorn the halls of the Felician motherhouse, including a portrait of Father Jarzebowski. A member of the Congregation of Marians of the Immaculate Conception, he was responsible for bringing the devotion to the United States.

It spread throughout Polish-American communities in the United States after World War II, and today is nearly ubiquitous, thanks to the Marians.

Today, the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy is located on Eden Hill in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the congregation’s headquarters, but Detroit seemed to play an important role in the early days of the devotion’s growing popularity in the North America.

The devotion to Jesus as the Divine Mercy is based on the writings of St. Faustina Kowalska, a young Polish nun who died of tuberculosis in 1938. On the second Sunday of Easter in 2000, St. John Paul II canonized Sister Faustina while establishing the liturgical date as “Divine Mercy Sunday.” This year it was April 3.

During her short life, St. Faustina reportedly received messages from Jesus, which she recorded in a diary. In one of her entries, she described in detail how Jesus appeared to her and his desire that she “paint an image according to the pattern you see, with the inscription: ‘Jesus, I trust in you.'” At St. Faustina’s request, an artist created the image of Jesus with a hand raised in blessing and red and pale rays of light emanating from his heart and the inscription just below the rays.

St. Faustina told her spiritual director, Marian Father Michael Sopocko, about her experiences. With World War II breaking out across Europe, Father Sopocko entrusted the message to his fellow Marian, Father Jarzebowski, who was fleeing Nazi-controlled Poland for the United States.

To evade Soviet officials, Father Jarzebowski obtained a passport from the Japanese consulate in Lithuania and arrived in the U.S. on a Seattle-bound ship in 1941, with nothing but a folded-up image of the Divine Mercy and a copy of the novena in his pocket. Through a series of recommendations, Father Jarzebowski met a third-year seminarian who became convinced of the devotion’s power and helped spread the message in America.

By October 1942, the Marians had received permission from the archbishop of Baltimore to print the first Polish editions of the Divine Mercy chaplet. The first English translations, some 50,000 copies, were later printed with the help of the Felician Sisters in Michigan and Connecticut.

Another of Father Jarzebowski’s early stops was in Orchard Lake, where the Polish seminary attracted strong devotion to the image of Divine Mercy. That connection that led him to the Felician motherhouse in Plymouth, according to Kathleen Wolski-Nuttall, facilitator of the St. Mary Shrine Chapel Divine Mercy Cenacle in Orchard Lake. She has been researching the history of Divine Mercy devotions in the United States for the better part of two years.

Michigan’s mark on spreading the Divine Mercy devotions in the United States was largely lost to history, Wolski-Nuttall said, but Sister Mary Fabia’s painting remains as a testament to the legacy of Father Jarzebowski’s mission.

It wasn’t until another local parishioner alerted The Michigan Catholic, Detroit’s archdiocesan newspaper, about a letter Father Jarzebowski had written and recorded in a history of the Felician Sisters in America that details of the background of the first image of the Divine Mercy painted in the United States began to come to light.

“The painting in the Felician motherhouse in Livonia is the first painting in the United States. It started here in Michigan, that is definite,” Wolski-Nuttall said.

In the 1940s and through the 1960s, the Marian Fathers had houses throughout Detroit dedicated to the Divine Mercy devotion. The Archdiocese of Detroit one of the first in the country to have such devotions.

But in the 1960s, the Marians Fathers ended their presence in Michigan, taking most of the history with them back to Massachusetts.

Without the support of the Marians, the devotion’s fervor faded again.

Michigan’s part in spreading the devotion is rarely acknowledged, save for a letter Father Jarzebowski wrote in 1957 that is chronicled in “Blazing New England Trails: Love and Service,” the history of the Felician Sisters in Enfield, Connecticut, the first American painting is still with the Felicians in Livonia.

“Our community uses it to promote the honor of God,” Sister Mary DeSales said. “It takes an outsider to make you appreciate all the treasures you have. It’s the nature of religious people not to brag. Sister Fabia didn’t look to brag, taking vows to build a sense of spirituality. She was just an instrument, seeking God’s glory and honor.”

So how could the first painting of the Divine Mercy in the United States, such an important piece of Catholic history in America, go unnoticed for so long? Simple: In 1943, nobody knew it would be history.

“At the time, the devotion to the Divine Mercy image wasn’t a big thing in the United States; she never planned on her painting to be a big deal,” Sister Mary DeSales said. “But she was inspired and painted this right here.”