Faustina Kowalska

The Diary is the private notebook of a Polish nun with almost no schooling who recorded visions of Christ between 1934 and 1938, and who died of tuberculosis at thirty-three. The Vatican placed it on the index of banned books in 1959, working from a poor translation; the ban was lifted in 1978 after pressure from the archbishop of Kraków, and that archbishop, by then John Paul II, canonised her in 2000 and made Divine Mercy Sunday a feast of the whole church. Whether the visions were what she believed them to be is a question of faith. The manuscript, the prohibition and the reversal are all documented.