“Oh, if all were to know how beautiful Jesus is, how amiable He is! They would all die of love. Our heart is made to love one thing only: Our Great God.
The great waterfalls are among the most splendid spectacles of nature. Volumes of rushing water, cascading with overwhelming force, envelope the surroundings in a mysterious and iridescent cloud of mist.
Our spirit is amazed at such a sight and easily associates it with a supernatural reality: the fathomless, fruitful and transforming love of God.
In fact, descending from on high, the living and varied waters of divine grace pour down upon men in infinite torrents. It fills souls open to it with charity, causing in them an ardent desire to repay this freely bestowed love of the Creator to the fullest measure possible.
We are all called to make of our lives an unwavering endeavour to recompense God for his countless benefits. Yet, some elect souls experience a mystical and transforming exchange of love and a special spiritual union with the Redeemer which allows them to live, even in this life, as though in eternity.
St. Gemma Galgani was one such soul. In her inestimable intimacy with Christ she affirmed: “I am no longer in myself; I am with my God, all for Him; and He all in me and for me. Jesus is with me, He is all mine.” 1
Conviviality with the supernatural
Gemma was born in Italy in Bogonuovo di Camigliano – Lucca, on March 12, 1878. She only knew her pious mother briefly but loved her deeply. As Signora Galgani slowly wasted away from tuberculosis, she strove to bequeath to her children a truly Catholic formation.
One of her last provisions was to assure that little Gemma received the fullness of baptismal grace through Confirmation—even before First Communion—as was then customary in Italy. Despite her physical weakness she personally prepared her daughter to receive the Sacrament with the aid of a catechist.
After the ceremony, the child stayed in the Basilica of San Michele in Foro for a thanksgiving Mass, and while praying for her dear mother, had her first supernatural locution. In her heart she heard a voice:
“Gemma, will you give me Mamma?”
“Yes, but provided You take me also,” she responded.
“No, give Me unreservedly your mother. For the present you must wait with your father. I will take you to heaven later.”
“I was obliged to answer ‘yes,’” 2 the saint confesses in her autobiography.
Graces of First Communion
In September of 1885, her mother piously surrendered her soul to God, leaving her daughter with a maternal aunt, Helen Landi. Some time later, Gemma returned to live with her father and entered as a day student in the school of the Sisters of St. Zita, founded by Blessed Helen Guerra.
She showed uncommon piety, and at nine years of age ardently requested the Holy Eucharist. She pleaded with her confessor, Monsignor Giovanni Volpi, her father and her teachers: “Give me Jesus and you will see how good I shall be. I shall be quite changed. I won’t commit any more sins!”
Finally the priest consented and, despite her young age for the time, she received the Eucharistic Jesus in her ardent and innocent soul for the first time on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1887. “It is impossible to explain what then passed between Jesus and me. He made Himself felt, oh so strongly, in my soul. I then understood how the delights of Heaven are not like those of the earth. I felt seized with a desire to make that union with my God everlasting.” 3
From that moment onward the sole objective of Gemma’s life was to unite herself to Jesus and become like him.
Spouse of Christ Crucified
Gemma committed herself wholeheartedly to school activities during the time with the Sisters of St. Zita. With her good example, she was the “soul” of the school. She was well liked and respected by her companions. Despite her reserved demeanour, she was gifted with concise speech and decisive action.
During this time, Our Lord showered her with interior graces, drawing her further along the path of perfection. Her youth was enveloped in frequent mystical phenomena, which observers could perceive to some degree in her gaze.
On one occasion, when she was seventeen, our saint received an expensive watch as well as a gold cross and chain. In order to please the relative who had given them to her, she wore these ornaments out-of-doors. On her return, her guardian angel looked at her and said: “The precious ornaments that adorn the spouse of a crucified King cannot be other than the thorns and the cross.” 4
The young girl, having always had a special devotion to the sufferings of Jesus, seriously took this counsel to heart, renouncing from then on anything that savoured of vanity, wearing only a simple black dress.
Beginning the “via dolorosa”
The saint narrates in her biography that since the death of her mother, she continually offered small sacrifices to Jesus. However, the hour soon arrived for her to begin drinking from the chalice of suffering in large draughts.
In 1896, a serious necrosis of the foot caused excruciating pain and made surgery necessary. Refusing anaesthesia, Gemma remained completely still during the procedure. Witnesses shuddered with horror at what seemed to be more a torture session than a therapeutic intervention. A slight, involuntary groan escaped her at the most painful part of the operation, but, with eyes fixed on the crucifix, she begged Jesus to pardon her weakness.
The following year, her father died after losing his entire fortune, leaving the family in extreme poverty.
Meeting with St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows
In 1898, Gemma was stricken by a serious spinal sickness and was bedridden. The slightest movement cost her much effort.
Her guardian angel consoled her in her pains and Our Lord used her sufferings to help her progress in the virtue of humility. She also acquired a special devotion to St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, a Passionist religious who had died thirty-six years earlier, and whose biography she avidly read during her illness.
One night, after having made the vow of virginity and the resolve to become a religious if she recovered her health, the Passionist saint appeared to her in a dream saying: “Gemma, make your vow to be a Religious freely and with good heart, but add nothing to it.” When she asked him why, he took the heart worn as a badge attached to his habit, gave it to her to kiss and placed it on her saying: “Sorella mia!—My sister!”
During this time, relatives and acquaintances redoubled novenas and triduums imploring her cure; yet, she remained indifferent, docile to the divine plan. At the end of one year, her health worsened; doctors diagnosed a tumour on her head, and pronounced the case hopeless. At that time, one of her former teachers convinced her to make a novena to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. On the last day of the novena, a few hours after receiving Holy Communion, the young girl stood up, completely cured. It was the first Friday of March.
“Do not cease to suffer for Him, not even for a moment”
On Good Friday of the following year, Gemma, still weak, practiced in her room the devotion of the “Three Hours’ Agony,” written by the founder of the Sisters of St. Zita, feeling, as she did so, a profound sorrow for her faults. When the prayer had ended, the figure of Jesus Crucified appeared before her, saying: “Daughter, behold these wounds. They have all been opened for your sins. But now, be consoled for they have been closed by your suffering. Offend Me no more. Love Me as I have always loved you.” 5
Days later, while she said her afternoon prayers, Christ Crucified once again appeared to her and said: “Look My child, and learn how to love. Look at this Cross, these thorns and nails, these livid marks and lacerations. These Wounds are all works of Love—of Infinite Love. See to what extent I have loved you. Do you want to truly love Me? Learn then to suffer: suffering teaches how to love.”
On another occasion, while she asked God for the grace of ardent love, she heard a supernatural voice say: “Do you wish to love Jesus always? Never cease even for a moment to suffer for Him. The Cross is the throne of true lovers; the Cross is the patrimony of the elect in this life.”
These experiences, while they intensified the sorrow she felt for her sins, also consoled her and increased her desire to love Jesus and suffer for Him.
The gift of the Holy Stigmata
On the eve of the Feast of the Sacred Heart of this same year, Gemma lost consciousness, and upon awaking, found herself in the presence of the Blessed Virgin, who said to her: “My Son Jesus loves you beyond measure and wishes to grant you a grace. Will you know how to render yourself worthy of it? The saint did not know how to answer. Our Lady added: “I will be a mother to you. Will you be a true child?” With this, she opened her mantle and covered Gemma with it.
At that moment Jesus appeared with his wounds open. With the simplicity of innocent souls, Gemma thus narrates what happened: “From these wounds there no longer came forth blood, but flames of fire. In an instant those flames came to touch my hands, my feet and my heart.” She remained beneath the mantle of the Queen of heaven for some time. Finally Mary kissed her forehead and vanished, leaving the young girl with strong pain in the hands, feet and heart, from which blood flowed: St. Gemma Galgani had received the grace of the holy stigmata.
The phenomenon was repeated each week. On Thursday, the wounds opened at evening and remained until three o’clock on Friday afternoon. On Saturday, or Sunday at latest, only some whitish marks remained.
In addition to the stigmata—which few suspected—Gemma experienced other frequent supernatural manifestations including sweating of blood and countless sporadic ecstasies. This made the relationship with her aunts, whom she had lived with since the death of her father, increasingly difficult.
She was removed from this trying situation by a pious woman, Cecilia Giannini, who, enchanted with the wonders of grace in that soul, adopted her as a daughter. In her new family, everyone treated her with veneration. They carefully noted down her words in her frequent raptures and were awed by the holy stigmata and wounds produced by the scourge of the flagellation and the thorns of the crown.
Meeting with the Passionist Fathers
It was in June of this same year of 1899—so important in the life of the saint—that Gemma had her first meeting with the Passionist Fathers, predicted by St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows.
At the end of this month, the “Holy Missions” began in the Church of St. Martin, preached by the priests of this Order. On the last day there was a general Communion, in which St. Gemma took part. During her thanksgiving, Jesus asked her: “Gemma, do you like the habit worn by that priest?” He pointed to a Passionist who was at a distance. “Would it please you, if you were also clothed in the same habit?”
The saint was speechless, and Our Lord continued, “You shall be a child of My Passion, and a beloved child. One of these shall be your father. Go and explain everything.”
After a series of vicissitudes, so common among elect souls, Gemma finally wrote, with the authorization of Monsignor Volpi, to Father Germanus of St. Stanislaus, a Passionist religious residing in Rome, whose name and face the Lord had shown her.
Endowed with great talent and virtue, this priest travelled to Lucca to meet her and became a true spiritual father to the saint. For three years, he deftly guided her along the path of perfection. Thanks to this spiritual direction, carried out mainly through letters, the extraordinary favours received by the angelical young woman were documented. They are touching missives, in which all the beauty of her soul shines.
“Consummatum est”
The final Calvary of the virgin of Lucca began in the Easter of 1902. Her body, bedridden by illness and unable to take any food, reflected the inner sufferings that weighed upon her soul, depriving her of consolation and sensible joy. From the depths of apparent abandonment, Gemma sighed, “Do You not know that I am all Thine? Jesus only!”
She had successively participated in all the torments of the God-Man: His interior anguish, His sweating of blood, His flagellation and numerous wounds, the abuse, by the work of the devils, the deep wounds from the crown of thorns, the dislocation of bones and the wounds from the nails. There only remained, to completely imitate the Redeemer in His Passion, agony and death in a sea of sufferings.
This unfolded on Holy Saturday of 1903. At only 25 years of age, the seraphic virgin was definitively freed from the bonds binding her to this earth and received her “reward exceeding great” (Gn 15:1), God Himself for all eternity.
* * *
Gemma’s soul entered into glory enriched by the one, true and endless treasure: charity. “If all were to know how beautiful Jesus is, how amiable He is! They would all die of love.”
Indeed, how different the world would be if it would heed the counsel of the virgin of Lucca and could say with her: “My heart palpitates continually with that of Jesus. Viva Gesu! The Heart of Jesus and my heart are one and the same thing […] Yes, I am happy, because I feel my heart beat with Thine. I am happy because I possess Thee, O Jesus.” ◊
Convent of Passionist Nuns of Lucca (Italy)
