The Divine Mercy Shrine at Lagiewniki in Krakow

1. Lagiewniki at a Glance

Lagiewniki is a district in the south of Krakow, and the Divine Mercy shrine there is built around a working convent of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. The community has occupied the site since the 1890s. Sister Faustina Kowalska entered that congregation in 1925, spent her novitiate years at Lagiewniki, returned there in 1936, and died in the convent on 5 October 1938 at the age of thirty-three. Her tomb is in the convent chapel, and the shrine grew up around it.

The Polish name of the shrine is Sanktuarium Bozego Milosierdzia, the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy. English speakers usually call it the Divine Mercy Shrine in Krakow, or simply Lagiewniki. The devotion associated with it, the image inscribed Jezu, ufam Tobie, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy and the feast of Divine Mercy Sunday, all trace back to what Faustina recorded in her diary.

The short version of the story

• 1862: the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy is founded in Warsaw, taking up a French model of houses for women in need of shelter and a fresh start.
• 1891: the neo-Gothic convent complex at Lagiewniki is completed, funded by a bequest from Prince Aleksander Lubomirski, with a chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph.
• 1926 to 1928: Faustina Kowalska makes her novitiate at Lagiewniki.
• 1934: the first painting of the image is made in Vilnius by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski, under Faustina's direction.
• 1936 to 1938: Faustina lives at Lagiewniki again, ill with tuberculosis, and dies there on 5 October 1938.
• 1943 and 1944: Adolf Hyla paints the image now venerated at Lagiewniki, offered as a votive for his family's survival of the war, and it is blessed at the side altar of the convent chapel.
• 1959: the Holy Office forbids the spread of the devotion in the forms Faustina proposed.
• 1966: Faustina's remains are exhumed and moved into the convent chapel.
• 1978: the Holy See withdraws the prohibition.
• 1993 and 2000: Faustina is beatified and then canonised by John Paul II, who establishes Divine Mercy Sunday for the universal Church at the canonisation.
• 2002: John Paul II consecrates the new Basilica of the Divine Mercy beside the old chapel and entrusts the world to Divine Mercy.
• 2016: the church of the John Paul II Centre across the road is consecrated, and Krakow hosts World Youth Day with mercy as its theme.

Everything in that list is documented, and none of it depends on accepting a private revelation. The shrine can be visited as a piece of Polish and Catholic history before it is visited as a place of devotion, and most pilgrims end up doing both at once.

2. Where Lagiewniki Is and What Stands There

Lagiewniki sits a few kilometres south of the old centre of Krakow, on rising ground above the Vistula valley. The name belongs to a village that was absorbed into the city in the twentieth century, and the area around the shrine is ordinary suburban Krakow: housing blocks, a railway line, a busy road. The shrine complex occupies a green terrace above that road, with a wall around the convent gardens.

Four things stand on or beside the site, and visitors commonly confuse them.

The tomb and the famous painting are in the old chapel. Pilgrims who walk straight into the large modern basilica and look for them there will not find them. The basilica was built to hold the crowds that the small chapel could never absorb, and the two churches work together, with the historic devotion in the old building and the large liturgies in the new one.

The site and the wider Krakow pilgrimage

Krakow has been a pilgrimage city for centuries, with the Wawel cathedral, the relics of Saint Stanislaus and a dense network of medieval churches. Lagiewniki is a twentieth-century addition to that map, and it now draws visitors from well beyond Poland. For the wider regional picture, our guide to pilgrimage sites in Central Europe sets Krakow alongside the other major shrines of the region, and the Marian shrine at Jasna Gora in Czestochowa lies roughly a hundred kilometres to the north-west.

3. The Convent and the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy

The Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy was founded in Warsaw in 1862 by Mother Teresa Ewa Potocka, who had studied a French congregation devoted to the care of women and girls in difficulty and brought its work to Polish soil. The sisters ran houses where women could live, learn a trade and rebuild a life, and the residents were understood as the reason the community existed. That work, plain and unglamorous, is the setting for everything that later happened at Lagiewniki.

The Krakow house was made possible by a large bequest from Prince Aleksander Lubomirski, and the complex that went up in the years around 1890 was designed in the neo-Gothic manner then favoured for Catholic institutions in the Austrian partition of Poland. Red brick, pointed windows, a chapel set into the range of buildings and a garden behind the wall. The chapel was dedicated to Saint Joseph, patron of workers and of a quiet household, which suited the character of the place.

Faustina Kowalska joined this congregation in 1925, at the age of twenty, after years of domestic service in Warsaw and Lodz. She was a lay sister, assigned to kitchens, gardens and the door, with limited formal education. She moved between the congregation's houses at Warsaw, Plock, Vilnius, Walendow and Krakow. The full account of her life, her diary and the shape of the devotion belongs to our profile of Saint Faustina Kowalska, and this page stays with the place.

4. Sister Faustina at Lagiewniki

Faustina lived at Lagiewniki in two distinct periods, and the second is the one that made the site a shrine. Her novitiate ran there from 1926 to 1928, the two years of formation that precede first vows in a religious congregation. She was young, obscure and unwell for part of it, and nothing about her presence marked the house out at the time.

The years in between took her elsewhere, above all to Vilnius, where she met the priest Michal Sopocko. He became her confessor and the man who took her reports seriously enough to have the image painted and to begin arguing, in print and in theological circles, for a feast of mercy. Sopocko was beatified in 2008. Almost everything the world now associates with Faustina was first put into practical form in Vilnius rather than in Krakow.

The last two years

In 1936 Faustina was sent back to Lagiewniki, by then ill with the tuberculosis that would kill her. She spent long stretches in the sanatorium at Krakow-Pradnik and returned to the convent between admissions. Her confessor in Krakow was the Jesuit Jozef Andrasz, who continued the direction Sopocko had begun. She went on writing the notebooks that were later published as the diary Divine Mercy in My Soul, and she went on doing the ordinary work her health still allowed.

She died in the convent on the evening of 5 October 1938, less than a year before the German invasion of Poland. She was thirty-three. Her funeral was small. The sisters buried her in the common grave in the convent cemetery in the garden, which was the ordinary practice of the community, and her family were not present.

5. Where Faustina Is Buried

Faustina is buried inside the convent chapel of Saint Joseph at Lagiewniki, beneath the side altar that carries the image of the Merciful Jesus. That is the direct answer to the question most people arrive with, and it has only been true since 1966.

For the first twenty-eight years after her death she lay in the sisters' common tomb in the convent cemetery in the garden, in a grave marked no differently from those of the other sisters. When the informative process for her cause opened in the Archdiocese of Krakow under Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, the canonical examination required the identification of her remains. The exhumation took place in 1966, and the bones were transferred into the chapel and placed beneath the side altar.

After her beatification in 1993 the tomb was rebuilt in a form suited to public veneration. A marble slab now covers it, a grille and a reliquary allow pilgrims to see and to touch the setting of the relics, and the inscription carries her name in religion, Sister Maria Faustina of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Relics from Lagiewniki have since been distributed to Divine Mercy shrines and parishes in many countries, which is the ordinary Catholic practice with the remains of a canonised saint.

The cell and the exhibition

The convent keeps a reconstructed cell of the kind Faustina occupied, along with a small display of objects associated with her, including items connected to her work in the kitchen and the garden. The reconstruction is honest about being a reconstruction. What it conveys well is the scale of the life: a narrow room, a bed, a chair, very little else, and a woman who wrote several hundred pages of a spiritual diary in the margins of a working day.

6. The Chapel of Saint Joseph

The old chapel is a small neo-Gothic space built into the convent range and finished around 1891. It was designed for a religious community of a few dozen sisters and the residents of the house, which is why it feels tight the moment a coach party arrives. A grille historically separated the sisters' choir from the public part, in the manner of nineteenth-century convent chapels.

The high altar carries a figure of Saint Joseph, the chapel's patron. The devotional centre of gravity, however, sits at the left-hand side altar, where the Hyla painting hangs above the tomb of Faustina. Pilgrims queue along that side of the chapel, and the flow of people is the practical reason a much larger church eventually had to be built next door.

How the image came to be there

During the German occupation the painter Adolf Hyla, who lived in Krakow, promised a votive offering if his family came through the war. They did. He offered the sisters a painting of the Merciful Jesus, working from a description and from earlier reproductions, since he had no access to the Vilnius original. His first version proved too large for the side altar, and a second version was made to fit the space. That second painting was blessed and installed at the side altar in the spring of 1944, on the Sunday after Easter, the day Faustina's writings had proposed as the feast of mercy. It has hung there ever since.

Dates and the sequence of the two Hyla versions follow the account published by the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, the custodians of the shrine, in their history of the image at Lagiewniki.

The chapel is used for the ordinary conventual liturgy as well as for pilgrim devotion, and the sisters continue to pray the Hour of Mercy there at three o'clock in the afternoon, the hour of Christ's death, which Faustina's diary singles out. That rhythm belongs to the devotion rather than to any tourist schedule, and it is the reason the chapel can be quiet in the morning and packed in the middle of the afternoon.

7. The Vilnius Image and the Krakow Image

Two different paintings are called the Divine Mercy image, and the difference matters enough that it is worth stating plainly. The first was painted in Vilnius in 1934 by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski. Faustina described what she had seen, Michal Sopocko posed for the figure of Christ, and the painter worked under their direction and her correction. That panel is the one made in the saint's own lifetime and with her supervision, and it is kept today in the Divine Mercy sanctuary in Vilnius, Lithuania, where it survived the Soviet period through a chain of concealments and private keeping.

The second is the Hyla painting at Lagiewniki, made in wartime Krakow without any sight of the Vilnius panel. It is the version widely reproduced on holy cards, in prayer books and in parish prints, largely because Krakow became the centre of the devotion after the war while Vilnius sat behind a closed Soviet border.

Neither painting is claimed by the Church to be miraculous in itself, and neither is a relic. Catholic teaching on sacred images holds that honour given to an image passes to the person represented, a principle defined at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 and repeated in the Catechism at paragraph 2132. On that principle a photocopy taped inside a prison cell and the panel in Vilnius do the same work.

Other well-known Divine Mercy paintings exist, including versions by Stanislaw Batowski and by later artists, and different countries have their own preferred rendering. Pilgrims sometimes arrive at Lagiewniki expecting the picture they grew up with and find a slightly different face. That is a fact about painters rather than about the devotion.

8. What the Image Actually Shows

The image shows Christ standing, stepping forward, his right hand raised in blessing and his left touching the garment at his breast. From that point two broad rays issue, one pale and one red. Beneath the figure runs the inscription Jezu, ufam Tobie, Jesus, I trust in You, which Faustina's writings give as the words the image was to carry.

The diary explains the two rays as the water and the blood that flowed from the pierced side of Christ, and John's Gospel is the source of that reading.

Catholic tradition from the Fathers onwards has read that blood and water as a sign of the sacraments flowing from the death of Christ, the water of baptism and the blood of the Eucharist. The image therefore points at something entirely public and sacramental. Whatever a viewer makes of the private revelation behind it, the picture is a piece of ordinary Catholic sacramental theology in visual form, and it sends the viewer to the font and the altar. Our guides to baptism and the Eucharist set out that teaching in full.

Why the inscription is a verb

The words under the image are a statement of trust addressed to a person. Faustina's diary treats that act of trust as the heart of the whole devotion, and the Church's approval of the image rests on the same point. The picture asks for an act, and the act is the one Scripture asks for everywhere from the Psalms to the Gospels.

The Chaplet of Divine Mercy, prayed on ordinary rosary beads, developed from the same source and is now prayed daily at Lagiewniki. Its structure is short, repetitive and offered to the Father through the passion of the Son, and it has spread far beyond Poland. Our guide to Catholic prayer places it among the wider forms of devotional prayer the Church recommends.

9. The Ban of 1959 and Its Lifting in 1978

The Divine Mercy devotion spent nineteen years under a Roman prohibition, and a visitor to Lagiewniki who does not know this will misread the whole history of the shrine. On 6 March 1959 the Holy Office issued a notification forbidding the spread of images and writings that promoted the devotion in the forms proposed by Sister Faustina. Bishops were instructed to remove such images from churches where they had been displayed.

Why the ban happened

Several causes ran together. Faustina's diary had circulated abroad in translations that were partial, unofficial and in places seriously inaccurate, and Roman consultors read a text that misrepresented what she had written. The Iron Curtain made a proper examination of the Polish sources difficult. The devotion had also spread rapidly and in an unregulated way through the war and the years after it, with claims attached to it in popular pamphlets that went beyond anything in her writings. The Holy Office acted on the material in front of it.

The sisters at Lagiewniki continued to keep the tomb and the chapel through those years, under the constraint of the notification and under a communist government that had its own reasons to obstruct Catholic devotional life in Poland.

How it was lifted

Archbishop Karol Wojtyla of Krakow opened the informative process into Faustina's life and virtues in the 1960s, and part of that work was a proper critical study of the diary in the original Polish, carried out by theologians who could read the manuscripts. Ignacy Rozycki, a Krakow theologian, produced the detailed theological analysis that answered the objections. On 15 April 1978 the Holy See issued a new notification declaring the earlier prohibition no longer binding, in view of the changed circumstances and the new evidence. Wojtyla was elected pope six months later.

10. Beatification, Canonisation and Divine Mercy Sunday

John Paul II beatified Faustina in Saint Peter's Square on 18 April 1993 and canonised her in the same square on 30 April 2000, in the Jubilee Year. Both dates fell on the Second Sunday of Easter, the day her writings had proposed for a feast of mercy.

At the canonisation Mass the pope declared that the Second Sunday of Easter would be called Divine Mercy Sunday throughout the Church. The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued the implementing decree on 5 May 2000. The feast does not displace the Sunday of the Octave of Easter or introduce new readings; it gives that existing Sunday a title and a devotional emphasis, and its Gospel remains John 20, the appearance to the apostles and to Thomas, in which the risen Christ gives the power to forgive sins.

That Gospel is the reason the feast sits where it does. The Church reads the institution of sacramental absolution on that Sunday every year, and the Divine Mercy title makes the connection explicit. Pilgrims who go to Lagiewniki and go to confession there are doing the thing the feast is about. Our guide to the sacrament of confession covers what the Church teaches and requires.

The two miracles

Two healings were accepted by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in the course of the cause, one for the beatification and one for the canonisation, each examined by medical and theological consultors under the ordinary procedure. Details of both were published in the acts of the cause. The Church's judgement in a canonisation concerns the holiness of the person and their intercession, and it is treated as certain by Catholics; the medical files behind it are the working evidence rather than the doctrine. Our guide to miracles and how the Church investigates them explains the standard applied.

Dates for the beatification, the canonisation and the decree establishing Divine Mercy Sunday are taken from the published acts of the Holy See.

11. The Basilica of the Divine Mercy

The Basilica of the Divine Mercy is the large modern church built on the terrace beside the convent between 1999 and 2002, to the design of the Krakow architect Witold Ceckiewicz. It was consecrated by John Paul II on 17 August 2002, during his last visit to Poland, and it was raised to the rank of basilica.

The building makes no attempt to imitate the neo-Gothic convent. It is a boat-shaped or ship-shaped form in concrete, stone and glass, with a curved roof and a great deal of natural light, and its plan is meant to read as an ark. The sanctuary wall behind the altar carries a copy of the Merciful Jesus image set against a construction of tangled branches and rock, with a tabernacle in the form of a globe. Opinion on the architecture divides sharply, and pilgrims who love the old chapel often find the basilica cold on a first visit.

The lower level and the national chapels

Below the main church runs a lower level containing a series of chapels, several of them given and decorated by particular countries and communities, including Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Germany and Ukraine among others. Each was fitted out in the idiom of its donors, so the lower level reads as a set of national styles side by side. A chapel of perpetual adoration is kept there, and confessions are heard in the lower level in a range of languages.

The tower

A free-standing tower rises beside the basilica, with a viewing gallery near the top that looks north across Krakow towards the old city and south over the district. The tower is a deliberate landmark, visible from the road and the railway, and it functions as the sign that marks the shrine from a distance. The gallery is open to visitors under arrangements the shrine sets, and those arrangements change.

12. The John Paul II Centre Across the Road

The Centre of Saint John Paul II, which takes the motto Have No Fear from the opening homily of his pontificate, stands on the far side of the road from the Divine Mercy shrine, in the area known as Biale Morza, the White Seas, named for the white lime waste heaps of the old Solvay chemical works. The ground matters. Karol Wojtyla worked as a labourer at the Solvay plant during the German occupation, first in the stone quarry at Zakrzowek and then in the water purification department, and he walked to the plant past the convent at Lagiewniki.

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who had been Wojtyla's secretary for four decades and became Archbishop of Krakow after his death, founded the centre. The foundation stone was laid in 2008 and included a stone taken from the tomb of Saint Peter in the Vatican, given by Benedict XVI. Construction ran through the beatification of John Paul II in 2011 and his canonisation in 2014, and the church of Saint John Paul II at the centre was consecrated in 2016.

What is inside

• The church of Saint John Paul II, an upper church with a lower level of chapels heavily decorated in mosaic.
• A relic of the blood of John Paul II, collected during his final illness and kept for veneration.
• A museum tracing his life from Wadowice through the war years, the Krakow priesthood and episcopate, and the pontificate, with personal objects including items connected to the attempt on his life in 1981.
• A reconstruction of the papal apartment chapel and of rooms associated with him.
• The John Paul II Institute, a research and conference body attached to the site.

The centre and the Divine Mercy shrine are separate institutions with separate custodians, and they are joined by a footbridge over the road. Visiting both in one day is the usual pattern. Our profile of Pope John Paul II covers his life, his teaching and the criticisms made of his pontificate; this page covers only the site.

13. The Papal Visits of 1997, 2002 and 2016

Three papal visits shaped what Lagiewniki has become, and the shrine's own account of itself is built around them.

7 June 1997

John Paul II came to the old chapel as pope and prayed before the image and the tomb. He spoke of his own connection with the place from the years of the occupation and said that there is nothing humanity needs more than the mercy of God. The visit came four years after the beatification, and it announced that a small convent chapel had become a shrine of international standing. Planning for a larger church followed.

17 August 2002

On his final journey to Poland the pope consecrated the new basilica and made an act entrusting the world to Divine Mercy. He asked that the message of merciful love sound out from Lagiewniki to the whole world, and he spoke of the fire of mercy needing to be passed on. The date is the one carved into the basilica, and the act of entrustment is reproduced at the shrine and prayed there.

30 July 2016

Pope Francis visited during World Youth Day in Krakow, whose theme was taken from the Beatitudes: blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy (Matthew 5:7). He prayed in the old chapel, passed through the Holy Door of the basilica, which had been opened for the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, and heard the confessions of a small number of young pilgrims. The World Youth Day of 2016 brought very large numbers to Krakow and fixed Lagiewniki on the map for a generation of Catholics outside Poland. Our guide to Catholic jubilee years and holy doors explains what a Holy Door is and what the Church attaches to passing through one.

14. What a Pilgrim Actually Sees

A first-time visitor arriving at Lagiewniki finds a working shrine on a hillside, with coaches, a car park, souvenir stalls, a queue at the old chapel and a great deal of concrete. Setting expectations honestly is a service, so here is the plain account.

The old chapel

Small, dim, neo-Gothic, with the queue moving along the left side towards the tomb and the image. People kneel at the grille, touch the marble, leave written petitions and move on. The atmosphere depends heavily on the hour, and pilgrims who want stillness generally aim for early morning rather than the middle of the day. Photography restrictions and the sisters' own liturgy govern what is possible at any given time.

The basilica

Large, bright and modern, with a very different feel. Confessions are heard in several languages, which for many pilgrims is the practical centre of the visit, and the lower level rewards a slow walk through the national chapels. The tower gives a view over the district and a sense of where the site sits in the city.

The centre across the road

A separate visit and a different register. The museum is a museum, with cases and captions and a long narrative, and it takes real time to see properly. The mosaic chapels below the church are the visual high point for many visitors.

Practical honesty

• The tomb and the venerated painting are in the old chapel, and only there.
• The two complexes are separate institutions with separate arrangements, and each publishes its own current information.
• Liturgical timetables and access arrangements for the museum, the tower and the convent exhibition all change. Check each institution's own site before travelling rather than trusting any third-party page, including this one, on such details.
• Krakow's other great pilgrimage sites, the Wawel cathedral above all, are a short journey away, and most pilgrims combine them.

Pilgrimage as a Catholic practice has a shape that is worth knowing before you set out, and our guide to what a pilgrimage actually is covers the tradition, the intention and the discipline. For the full directory of the sites this site documents, see our guide to Catholic pilgrimage sites worldwide.

15. What the Church Claims, and What It Does Not

Precision here protects both the devotion and the reader. The Church has made several definite judgements about Faustina and Lagiewniki, and it has withheld judgement on other things that popular devotional literature sometimes asserts.

What the Church has done

• Canonised Faustina Kowalska on 30 April 2000, a judgement that she lived heroic virtue, is in heaven and may be venerated publicly throughout the Church.
• Established Divine Mercy Sunday on the Second Sunday of Easter for the universal Church, with the implementing decree of 5 May 2000.
• Withdrawn the 1959 prohibition on the devotion by the notification of 15 April 1978.
• Permitted and encouraged the image, the chaplet and the Hour of Mercy as devotional practices, and attached indulgences to certain acts of the devotion under the ordinary rules governing indulgences.
• Consecrated the basilica at Lagiewniki in 2002 and given it the rank of basilica.

What the Church has not done

• The Church has not made Faustina's diary part of public revelation. Public revelation closed with the death of the apostles, and the Catechism states at paragraph 67 that private revelations do not belong to the deposit of faith and are not required to be believed even when approved.
• The Church has not declared any particular sentence of the diary to be a verbatim word of Christ. Approval of a private revelation means that it contains nothing contrary to faith and morals and may be published, and it goes no further than that.
• The Church has not declared either painting miraculous, and neither is a relic.
• The Church has not attached automatic outcomes to devotional acts in the way some popular pamphlets suggest. Promises reported in a private revelation are read within the ordinary teaching on grace, repentance and the sacraments, and no devotional practice bypasses conversion, confession and charity.

The healthiest way to read Lagiewniki is the way the Church itself reads it. A young sister with almost no schooling wrote down what she believed she had received, the Church examined it slowly and with a long interruption, and what emerged was a devotion pointing at the sacraments and at the mercy shown in Christ's death. The place is worth the journey, and the teaching it carries stands on Scripture and on the Church's ordinary doctrine whether or not any reader is persuaded by the diary. Our guide to the saints and what canonisation means covers the wider question.