The history of the Image of the Merciful Jesus begins on February 22, 1931, with the first of a series of revelations to Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, in the convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Vilnius. It continues with Reverend Michael Sopocko, a spiritual director to the obedient nun upon whose request Mr. Eugeniusz Kazimirowski began the painting of an original image under Sister’s instruction in 1934.

To accurately reproduce the divine beauty of Our Lord was something impossible in Faustina’s mind. “Who will paint you as beautiful as you are?” she asked Him through her tears. “Not in the beauty of the color, nor of the brush lies the greatness of this image, but in My grace,” the Lord replied. (Diary, 313).

 Father Sopocko’s assistance in Kazimirowski’s creative process brought the first Divine Mercy Image to the world that same year (pictured above). Other versions sprung into Church history at the hands of various artists over time, but Sopocko maintained that the Kazimirowski prototype, as he called it, was the ideal and most correct of any. “One needs very much to retain Sister Faustina’s mind,” he writes to Reverend Father Julian Chroschiechowski in 1956: “the walking position, the right hand not going above the shoulder, the eyes looking downward, the rays in the direction of the viewer, and not toward the ground as in the Lagiewniki image. [Sister] Faustina actually speaks of a pale [colorless] ray although sometimes she expresses herself that it’s white” (Stackpole, 83) .

Sopocko worked tirelessly to preserve and promote the authenticity of the first Divine Mercy Image. He openly opposed, for example, the version painted in 1942 by Adolf Hyla, a neighbor of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Lagiewniki, considering it overly feminine, at variance with clear details that Faustina provided many years prior, and having an inappropriate, illogical background. Hyla offered to paint the image for the sisters to thank them for aiding his family in the turmoil of war, and it remains today a very popular painting. From Mother Superior Irena Kryzanowska, he received a reproduction of the Kazimirowski version and a description of the revelation of Jesus. Guided also by Sister Faustina’s first spiritual director, Reverend Joseph Andrasz, S.J, the Cracovian artist painted a fourth successor to the Divine Mercy Image and saw it solemnly blessed in the sisters’ convent at Lagiewniki.

Irena Kryzanowska’s engagement in the creation of the first and subsequent images is accordingly well known. What is more, her fondness for Jesus the Merciful permeated the congregation. “ ‘When I became the Superior in Cracow,’” Mother Irena recollects, “‘I acquired the image […], which I placed on the altar of St. Joseph. Our sisters and wards venerated it greatly. On Divine Mercy Sundays, we used to place it on the main altar and listen to the sermon on mercy’” (Sopocko ). Previously, with the first original version remaining in Vilnius, Mother General Michaela Moraczewska also commissioned a new painting and had it placed in the chapel of the General House in Warsaw. This particular Divine Mercy Image was the second in Church history, and the sisters liked it so much that they asked the same artist, Stanislaw Batowski, to execute a third for the chapel at Lagiewniki. The Hyla image came next in 1942.

 A fifth version, called the Sledzinski image, Father Sopocko himself instigated as with every effort he sought to demonstrate the image’s association with public revelation. Their Excellencies the Bishops decided in 1953 to prohibit the exposure of the Divine Mercy Image in churches so as not to anticipate the Holy See’s decision regarding the authenticity of private revelation. Sopocko in turn projected the image as representing Christ in the moment of instituting the Sacrament of Divine Mercy (of Penance) in the Upper Room (John 20: 19 ff). Consonant with Sister Faustina’s own thoughts, he provided the doors of the Cenacle for a background, and Professor Ludomir Sledzinkski accomplished a new painting according to the Kazimirowski prototype. Though more feminine than Father Sopocko cared to see, the Sledzinkski image depicts Christ at the time of His institution of the Sacrament of Penance when, to all present, Our Lord uttered “Peace to you!” In it, the Principle Episcopal Commission first saw the Divine Mercy Image as being a visual commentary on the liturgy – particularly the liturgy of Low Sunday, the Sunday following the Resurrection of Christ. The Commission thereafter approved Divine Mercy as stemming from public revelation, though on condition that the image remain disconnected from private revelation until verified by the Apostolic See in that regard. The story of the Image of the Merciful Jesus, at least this portion, closes here on the sixteenth anniversary of Sister Faustina’s death in 1954.

(special thanks to Jennifer Craig)