I want to tell you about a young woman who has been constantly on my mind — a reminder to be steadfast in my faith and to unite my suffering to the cross.
Her name is Gemma Galgani. She was born in Tuscany in 1878, the fourth of eight children, to a pharmacist father and a mother who died of tuberculosis when Gemma was seven years old. She died herself at twenty-five, in 1903, of the same disease — tuberculosis of the spine — after years of suffering that would have broken almost anyone. The Church canonized her in 1940. Her feast day is tomorrow, May 11, and I have been excited to tell you more about her for the past few weeks.
Gemma Galgani received the stigmata beginning in 1899, when she was twenty-one years old. Every Thursday evening through Friday afternoon, she bore in her hands, feet, and side the wounds of the Passion. She went into ecstasy. She suffered. And then, on Friday afternoon, the wounds closed, leaving no scar. This happened repeatedly, witnessed by those around her, documented, examined, and eventually verified by the Church. She also had a visible relationship with her guardian angel, whom she spoke to as naturally as you or I might speak to a friend in the room. She experienced diabolical attacks — real, physical assaults — that left her bruised and exhausted. And she was granted, in the mystical tradition of the great saints, a spiritual espousal to Christ — a union of her soul to her Lord so total and so verified by the Church that it defines the whole arc of her short life.
But before any of that — before the stigmata, before the visions, before the guardian angel — there was a little girl in Lucca who wanted one thing above everything else. She wanted to receive Jesus in the Eucharist. Her family resisted. She was only nine. But she begged so persistently and grieved so visibly at being kept from the altar, that her pastor finally relented — saying she would otherwise die of grief. She received Our Lord for the first time on June 17, 1887, and wrote afterward that she felt a fire burning in her heart. She had been consumed by the desire for Christ before she had words to name it.
She refused male attention, refused proposals, refused for men to turn their eyes to her. She had made her resolution early and kept it her whole life: she would wear no vanity, pursue no romance, seek no earthly consolation. Her guardian angel had told her plainly — the ornaments that befit the spouse of a Crucified King are the thorns and the Cross.
The more I read her own words, in her autobiography and diary, the more I encountered not a dramatic mystic performing signs and wonders, but a young woman who was embarrassed by all of it. Who begged her confessor not to tell anyone. Who wrote about her experiences with a simplicity that only deepened my faith. She was not trying to impress anyone. She was trying to love God.
Gemma Galgani fought for souls. Not in a metaphorical sense — she prayed, she fasted, she offered her suffering explicitly and deliberately for the conversion of sinners, for the sanctification of priests, for people she had never met and would never meet. She wrote letters to her spiritual director describing her anguish over souls she felt slipping away from God, people in her town, people in her family, strangers. She took it personally. She could not be at rest knowing that someone near her was far from God.
Because her faith is what I strive for — one that refuses to be at peace while people around me are far from the things that matter most. That is why I joined the Vocations Committee. That is why I sit down every week to write to you. That is why, on Thursday evenings at adoration, your names come with me into that chapel.
Since discovering her, Gemma has been my constant reminder — her image on my phone every day, prompting me to pray and look up to our Father for guidance. I need that reminder. Holiness is not a personality type or a level of theological education, or a charism reserved for the few. It is a decision, made again every morning, to remain close to God and to fight — quietly, persistently, without fanfare — for the souls of the people in your life.
I am doing a novena to her right now — nine days of prayer, asking for her intercession in my own life and in this ministry. Every Thursday I sit with a small pamphlet in my book bag, turn it open, and put my mind to Saint Gemma.
You are preparing for a priesthood that will ask you, every day, to carry the souls of others. Gemma carried the sinners she wept over in her diary. The priest stands at the altar and offers not only bread and wine but the people — all of them, the faithful and the struggling and the far-gone and the almost-there. He does not get to choose which souls he carries. He carries them all.
Her feast arrives May 11th. She is a patron of students, of those facing temptation, of those who suffer in body or spirit. She is, in the words the Church has given her, the Gem of Jesus.
Ask her to pray for you. She will.
In Christ,
*Robert Trimble, MD*
Vocations Committee — St. Peter Prince of the Apostles