“Christ is living within me”: On the life, suffering, and death of St Gemma Galgani

Although the vast collection of recognized saints known as the Roman Martyrology gives April 11 as the feast of St Gemma Galgani, May 16 is when it is observed by the Passionists. So I will take some time today to reflect on this remarkable young woman.

Born into a pious Tuscan family in 1878, the fifth of eight children and the family’s first girl, Gemma grew up in what we would likely now call an upper-middle-class home. She was a clever girl, well-liked by her family and especially doted on by her father.

Tragedy and suffering

Yet this seemingly idyllic life was soon marked by tragedy. When Gemma was little more than two years old, her mother contracted tuberculosis. Her parents did not want their children to contract the disease, so they were sent to a day school. This forced partial separation only deepened Gemma’s affection for her mother during this period, and what time they were able to have together, her mother spent teaching her daughter how to pray, instructing her in the Faith, and speaking about Jesus’ Passion. With the additional instruction of a tutor, Gemma was able to receive the sacrament of Confirmation at seven years old, shortly before her mother’s death.

Her Autobiography, written at the request of her spiritual director some dozen odd years after the fact, records that it was at her Confirmation that Gemma first heard Our Lord speak within her heart. Jesus asked her if she was willing to give Him her mother, the person most dear to Gemma at this point. She consented, with the condition that Jesus take her as well. Our Lord told her that she would have to wait until later, and she reluctantly consented to give Our Lord what she wanted. Her mother died in the eighth year of Gemma’s life.

This moment of interior conversation established a pattern that would mark the rest of Gemma’s life. Looking from the outside, one might observe a life lived no doubt much like many Italian girls and young women of the period lived. She was perhaps more sober and pious than many of her peers. And her life was certainly marked by further tragedies: At age 16, her favorite brother, Gino, died of tuberculosis while studying for the priesthood. By the time she was 18, her father had gone bankrupt, leaving the family destitute, and hastening his death by throat cancer the same year. The next year, she contracted what her life calls “spinal tuberculosis” (possibly spinal meningitis), which she believed she only survived due to a miraculous intervention.

At age twenty-one, after refusing at least two marriage proposals, Gemma was accepted into the home of a pious Catholic family as a kind of live-in nanny and housekeeper. It was here that she spent the last four years of her life. She always longed for a deeper prayer life, and with the permission of her spiritual director, she made a private vow of virginity. She applied several times to join the Passionist nuns, but even here she was disappointed, for each time she was turned down. Her poor health was cited as the main reason, but not the only one.

Prayer and controversy

Parallel to this ordinary life, Gemma was living an extraordinary life with God in prayer. Building on the foundation laid by her mother and the religious sisters who educated her, the young woman ordered her life around her daily conversation with God. And God saw fit to give her many mystical gifts: the interior locutions that began at her Confirmation continued, and at times she spoke visibly with Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints. She spoke frequently with and often saw her guardian angel. She struggled against fierce temptations and often saw the devil in physical form as well.

On one occasion, the journal she kept for her spiritual director disappeared; when it reappeared again after much prayer, it bore scorch marks on every page, which her confessor took to be Satan’s efforts to destroy it. She would often experience moments of ecstatic prayer, and several witnesses reported seeing her levitate on some of these occasions. And for the last years of her life, from Thursday night into Friday, she experienced the stigmata.

Though the marks would disappear and reappear, Gemma bore (at least on occasion) not only the five wounds most associated with the Crucifixion, but other visible signs of Our Lord’s Passion: these included signs of the shoulder wound tradition says Our Lord suffered from bearing the Cross as well as wound on the knees recalling His falls, as well as marks suggesting the crowning with thorns. Most troubling to those who cared about Gemma were the times she bore in her body a reflection of the scourging at the pillar.

These gifts led to further suffering, as they made it impossible for Gemma to hide the gifts God was giving her. Members of the household she lived with saw, and soon the entire town knew. Two camps arose among those who heard about these mystical experiences, a division that has continued to this day. Some, especially those who knew Gemma’s piety and charity firsthand, saw these extraordinary signs as a mark of God’s favor and essentially venerated her as a living saint. But others saw her stigmata as caused by mental illness, autosuggestion, or even suggested that they were self-inflicted. Those who doubted the authenticity of her experiences included members of her own family.

The talk in the town got so bothersome that her spiritual director asked her to pray to Our Lord to take away these outward signs, which He did. Yet the controversy and gossip were reasons why the nuns were reluctant to admit her to the convent.

The final illness

In September 1902, Gemma contracted what was to be her final illness. By the end of January 1903, this illness had been confirmed as tuberculosis, and for fear of contagion, she was given a small apartment near her adoptive family. It was here that she died on April 11, 1903, which that year happened to coincide with Holy Saturday. She was only twenty-five. Her reputation of sanctity spread after her death, aided by the biography written by her spiritual director. Pope Pius XI beatified her in 1933, only 30 years after her death, and Pius XII canonized her in 1940.

There are people to this day who still dismiss St Gemma’s mystical experiences as self-deception, or worse. Others see her as a profound example that God can still work wonders in the present age as He has done in the past. But these wonders God worked in her life are not the most important lesson to be learned from St Gemma. Not everyone, of course, is called to be a stigmatist, or even to live a life marked by such deep suffering as hers was. The key to St Gemma’s sanctity was not in her sufferings per se, nor in the remarkable phenomena she experienced in her prayer, as wondrous as they are. What makes St Gemma so important to us, what marks her as a great saint, is difficult to capture in an essay this brief, but it is blindingly obvious to anyone who reads her biography or her writings.

This young woman, living at the dawn of the twentieth century, was truly and profoundly in love with Jesus Christ and His Passion.

Jesus was her everything. She woke up speaking to Him and fell asleep singing His praises. In her collected letters, the name of Jesus is mentioned almost 1500 times. One example out of these hundreds:

I wish that my heart could beat, that I could live and breathe only for Jesus. I wish that my tongue could utter no other name than that of Jesus; that my eye could see only Jesus; that my pen could write only about Jesus, and that my thoughts could soar to nothing but Jesus.

Our Lord’s suffering and death were St Gemma’s special devotion. How fitting that she died on Holy Saturday, joining her Beloved in that Sabbath where He rested from His supreme saving work. How fitting her attraction to the Passionists, whose founder, St Paul of the Cross, put under the sign of the Cross in such a profound way.

Saint Paul and Saint Gemma

But I want to conclude these reflections by turning to another St Paul, Paul of Tarsus. Pope Benedict XVI famously taught that “The saints are the true interpreters of holy Scripture.” It is hard not to see in the life of St Gemma Galgani a twentieth-century echo of the experiences of St Paul.

Remember that Paul’s first moment of conversion came when he rode to Damascus to imprison and execute Christians in that city. A blinding light threw him to the ground, and Our Lord asked him: “Why do you persecute Me?” (Cf Acts 9:1-6) From that moment, Paul became convinced of the intimate connection between our sufferings endured as Christians and the very sufferings of Christ Himself.

St Gemma points us back to St Paul’s theology of the Cross. Her sufferings, precisely as a participation in Christ’s sufferings, were her way of advancing the cause of Christ. How easily one can imagine her taking as her own the words of St Paul, “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.” (Cf Col 1:24) She could even say with the great convert and missionary, “I bear on my body the marks of Christ” (cf Gal 6:17).

I am not the first to note this connection between St Gemma and St Paul. Pius XII remarks in his decree of canonization that “there was such a union of mind and heart between the chosen virgin Gemma and Christ that she could say with the apostle Paul: I have been crucified with Christ, and the life I live is now not my own; Christ is living within me” (cf Gal 2:20).

We are not all called to bear the Gospel to the ends of the earth like St Paul. Nor will many of us receive mystical favors, as did St Gemma. Yet we will all face suffering in our lives. The humble Italian girl, so close to our own time, reminds us not to waste our sufferings but to embrace our crosses as a witness to the Cross of Him who loves the whole world.

Let us pray with the Passionists today for St Gemma’s intercession:

All-powerful God,
you made the virgin Saint Gemma Galgani
a living image of your crucified Son.

Through her prayers, may we suffer with Christ
and so share in his glory,
for he lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,
for ever and ever.

Amen.