Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today we have two Blesseds who are sort of almost in competition. We have to pick one of them and of course, we pick St. Faustina because she's better known, more popular.
But we also have a debt to Blessed Francis Xavier Silos, who worked to evangelize in this country. We owe our faith to the missionaries who came before us, who helped to spread that faith and educate our ancestors.
Blessed Silos was born, so first we'll talk about him in chronological order and then get to St. Faustina. Blessed Silos was born on January 11th, 1819, in Bavaria, a particularly Catholic part of Germany. He was a sickly child who seemed destined to die young, as happened to three of his eleven siblings. At nine, he received confirmation, and after that, he didn't get sick as often. As a child, he did well in school and he would also play priest. In 1837 while he was in high school, or more properly gymnasium, he joined the greater Latin-Marian confraternity, whose other members over the centuries include St. Alphonsus, St. Bernadette, and St. Therese. After graduation, he went to study philosophy and theology at a university in Munich in preparation for eventually becoming a priest.
There he got to know the Redemptorists, and he applied to enter the Redemptorists in America.
He would be a missionary serving German-speaking immigrants. He was accepted and on March 17th, 1843 he sailed for New York City. After a year as a novice, he made his profession and was ordained a priest, well he made his profession in May 1844 and was ordained a priest December 22nd of that same year. In August 1845, he was assigned to the parish of St. Philomena in Pittsburgh as an assistant pastor under St. John Neumann, if you prefer. He had a lot of trouble learning English, so he thought that perhaps he would just minister in German.
But there was such a need for confessors that he began accepting confessions also in English hoping that he would understand. And by the help of God, he found that he was able to confess well in English. He became a sought-after confessor and spiritual director. People would even come from neighboring towns from outside Pittsburgh to confess to him or to ask his advice for the spiritual life. During a retreat in 1848 he committed to achieving holiness but he knew it would be hard. One of the things that he wrote in his notes for the retreat was, oh help, oh help, oh Holy Mother of God, let me become so inflamed and sanctified that I'm not always thinking of breakfast. He became the pastor of St. Philomena's in 1851, and the following year he became a U.S. citizen. Two years later he was transferred to Baltimore and he would spend the next several years in Maryland. In 1862 he was chosen to lead an itinerant parish mission band that would preach in ten states over the next two years. He didn't seem to, he doesn't seem to have come to Indiana, but he did preach in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois. And sort of like the gospel for today could always be a gospel for his feast because this is a gospel that's used for the feast days of priests who would like to, as the 72 disciples were collaborators of the apostles, so priests collaborate with or cooperate with bishops, or of course the successors of the apostles.
So after his time as a traveling missionary, he was stationed in Detroit for a year and then on September 28, 1866 he was transferred to St. Mary of the Assumption in New Orleans.
In the train on the way down he met a sister of Notre Dame who asked him if he was going to stay long in the city. He replied, for a year and then I will die of yellow fever.
He was a prophet, that's exactly what happened. Yellow fever broke out in New Orleans on September 3, 1867. Like a good pastor he served the sick and his conferes. Eleven redemptorist priests and brothers in that area caught the disease and four would die of it, including Our Blessed who got it on September 17 and died on October 4, 1867.
Thirty-eight years later St. Faustina was born in Poland in the village of Głogowiec.
She was the third child of farmers who were poor in money but rich in faith. She was baptized Helen and seven siblings followed after her, that is were born after her. As a child she showed a love of prayer, work and obedience and a sensitivity for the poor. At seven she already felt drawn to religious life but her family was reluctant to let her go. They needed her help as one of the older sisters, she did a lot in the family. To help her family at sixteen she left home to work as a housekeeper in nearby cities. One day when she was eighteen she had gone to a dance. Christ appeared to her suffering and said, how long shall I put up with you and how long will you keep putting me off? That is, when will you respond to your religious vocation? 
She wept and went to the cathedral to pray and eventually after a long prayer she was told in the depths of her heart to go to Warsaw and so she left that very day. There she knocked on the door of various convents, but she had no dowry and no prior contact with any of those congregations so she was repeatedly turned down. God was telling her to do something and it seemed impossible to do. Eventually she knocked on the door of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. She spoke to the Mother General who asked her to go into the chapel and ask the master of the house if this was the community for her. She went and prayed before the tabernacle and Our Lord said to her, I do accept you are in my heart. She told this response to Mother Michiela who agreed to admit her. However first she would have to work for a year and save some money to have a dowry. She entered the congregation on August 1st, 1925, and received the name Sister Mary Faustina. 
She was a sister for 13 years, working as a cook, gardener, and porter in 14 different convents in Krakow, Wlok, and Vilnius. Externally there was nothing special about her. She was a good hardworking sister but nothing more. But God had chosen her to be the apostle and secretary of His mercy and gave her frequent mystical experiences, which she wrote about in her diary. Only those who guided her knew of this. For several years she was prepared for her mission by various experiences that included a visit to Purgatory. Purgatory is both an expression of God's mercy and something from which His mercy wants to save us and can save us if we respond very generously in this life. Her soul was purified by trials, including a spiritual dark night.
Then in Vilnius on February 22nd, 1931, Jesus appeared to her as the King of Divine Mercy wearing a white garment with red and pale rays coming from His heart, as you can see in the Divine Mercy image. He told her to paint an image according to what she saw with the signature “Jesus, I trust in you” and promised graces to those who would venerate it. But she didn't know how to paint. She told her confessor, who said well, you should paint the image of Jesus in your soul. But as soon as she left the confessional, Jesus told her that that was not what he meant. She talked to her mother superior, who wanted a sign that Jesus was speaking to Saint Faustina. But Jesus replied I will make this all clear to the superior by means of the graces which I will give through the image. This is like when God appeared to Moses in the desert and asked him to let his people go. Moses asked for a sign, and God replied this shall be the sign for you that I have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt you shall serve God on this mountain. So you'll get the sign when the job is done. Moses insisted and eventually got a sign before he started.
But, Saint Faustina didn't get a sign quite so quickly. She did get a sign before the image was painted, but not a sign to convince her mother superior because she was then no longer in that convent. She struggled for a few years with the impossible task of trying to accomplish something that she couldn't do personally and couldn't get any help to do. Matters were made worse by the fact that she had no permanent confessor, no priest to guide her in a stable way who could understand her and know how to lead her. She was just sent wherever a sister was needed to work. She was very useful because she was such a hard worker and a good sister, so they sent her to 14 convents in the course of her 13 years of religious life. Eventually, she met Father Sopoczko, whom our Lord indicated to her as the visible help for you on earth. He became her spiritual director. He examined her mystical experiences and found them sufficiently trustworthy to proceed with having a painting made. He found an artist in Vilnius. St. Faustina found it hard to explain what the painting should look like, so she asked Jesus for help and got an explanation of the two rays as well as a request for Divine Mercy Sunday to be instituted. When she saw the painting, it was a great disappointment to her in comparison with the beauty of Jesus in her visions, but he explained not in the beauty of the color nor the brush lies the greatness of this image but in my grace. Now the image was made, but it had to be publicly venerated. She was told that it had to be placed on the eastern gate to Vilnius. The eastern gate is a symbol of Our Lady. It was the eastern gate of the temple in Ezekiel's vision that represented Our Lady and her virginity in particular, and Vilnius had dedicated the eastern gate of their city to Our Lady. St. Faustina told Fr. Sopoczko what Jesus wanted done, but he didn't see any way that he could go about it. He didn't have any authority to put that image on the eastern gate. Then he was invited to preach unexpectedly at a jubilee celebration held at the gate on April 26th to 28th, 1934. These were the last three days of the octave of Easter, so it was leading up to the Sunday after Easter, the future Divine Mercy Sunday. Fr. Sopoczko asked for the image to be displayed next to the icon of Our Lady on the gate and was told no, but later the Archbishop suddenly acquiesced. So he preached for three days about Divine Mercy, and the image was publicly venerated. St. Faustina Kowalska and Blessed Michael Sopoczko had done what they could, and Jesus did the rest. Further revelations followed about the Divine Mercy chaplet, the Hour of Mercy. Meanwhile, St. Faustina's life was drawing to a close because as her mission it was drawing to a close. In 1934 she got tuberculosis, and by 1936 it had worsened to the point that she had to be admitted to a sanatorium. She was in and out of sanatorium for the next two years until her death on October 5th, 1938. After her death, Blessed Michael Sopoczko wrote a booklet that made parts of the Divine Mercy message known, and then later, the publication of her diary made the message more fully known.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.