Gemma Galgani

For other uses, see Gemma (disambiguation).

Saint Gemma Galgani
Virgin
Born	Gemma Umberta Maria Galgani (1878-03-12)12 March 1878 Camigliano, Capannori, Italy
Died	11 April 1903(1903-04-11) (aged 25) Lucca, Italy
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church
Beatified	14 May 1933 by Pope Pius XI
Canonized	2 May 1940, Saint Peter's Basilica, Vatican City by Pope Pius XII
Major shrine	Passionist Monastery in Lucca, Italy
Feast	11 April (celebrated by Passionists on 16 May)
Attributes	Passionist habit, flowers (lilies and roses), crucifix, stigmata
Patronage	Students, Pharmacists, Paratroopers and Parachutists, loss of parents, those suffering back injury or back pain, those suffering with headaches/migraines, those struggling with temptations to impurity and those seeking purity of heart

Gemma Umberta Maria Galgani (12 March 1878 – 11 April 1903), also known as Gemma of Lucca, was an Italian mystic, venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church since 1940. She has been called the "daughter of the Passion" because of her profound imitation of the Passion of Christ. She is especially venerated in the Congregation of the Passion of Jesus (Passionists).

Early life

Gemma Umberta Maria Galgani was born on 12 March 1878, in the hamlet of Camigliano in the province of Capannori. Gemma was the fifth of eight children and the first daughter; her father, Enrico Galgani, was a prosperous pharmacist.

Soon after Gemma's birth, the family relocated north from Camigliano to a larger new home in the Tuscan city of Lucca. Her parents moved the family to Lucca to increase educational opportunities available to their children. Gemma's mother, Aurelia Galgani, contracted tuberculosis when Gemma was two-and-a-half years old. Due to the difficulty of raising a child without her mother, young Gemma was placed in a private nursery school run by Elena and Ersilia Vallini.

Several members of the Galgani family died during this period. Their firstborn child, Carlo, and Gemma's little sister Giulia died at an early age. On 17 September 1885, Aurelia Galgani died from tuberculosis, which she had suffered from for five years, and Gemma's beloved brother Gino died from the same disease while studying for the priesthood.

Education

Galgani was sent to a Catholic half-boarding school in Lucca run by the Oblates of the Holy Spirit. She excelled in French, arithmetic, and music. At the age of nine, Galgani was allowed to receive her First Communion.

Adolescence

At age 16, Galgani developed spinal meningitis, but recovered. She attributed her extraordinary cure to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the intercession of Saints Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows and Marguerite Marie Alacoque. Galgani had a particular devotion to the Sacred Heart.

Shortly after turning 19, Galgani was orphaned, and thereafter was responsible for raising her younger siblings, which she did with her aunt Carolina. She declined two marriage proposals and became a housekeeper with the Giannini family.

Mysticism

Further information: Mysticism and Religious ecstasy

According to a biography by her spiritual director, Germano Ruoppolo, Galgani began to manifest the stigmata on 8 June 1899, at the age of 21. She stated that she had spoken with her guardian angel, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and other saints especially Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows. According to her testimonies, she sometimes received special messages from them about current or future events. With her health in decline, Ruoppolo directed her to pray for the disappearance of her stigmata; she did so and the marks left. She said that she resisted the devil's attacks often.

Galgani was frequently found in a state of ecstasy. She has also been reputed to levitate: she claimed that on one occasion, when her arms were around the crucifix in her dining room and was kissing the side wound of Jesus, she found herself raised from the floor.

Stigmata

Gemma Galgani is said to have experienced stigmata on 8 June 1899, the eve of the feast of the Sacred Heart. She wrote:

I felt an inward sorrow for my sins, but so intense that I have never felt the like again ... My will made me detest them all, and promise willingly to suffer everything as expiation for them. Then the thoughts crowded thickly within me, and they were thoughts of sorrow, love, fear, hope and comfort.

In her subsequent rapture, Gemma saw her guardian angel in the company of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

The Blessed Virgin Mary opened her mantle and covered me with it. At that very moment, Jesus appeared with his wounds all open; blood was not flowing from them, but flames of fire which in one moment came and touched my hands, feet and heart. I felt I was dying, and should have fallen down but for my Mother (Blessed Virgin Mary) who supported me and kept me under her mantle. Thus I remained for several hours. Then my Mother kissed my forehead, the vision disappeared and I found myself on my knees; but I still had a keen pain in my hands, feet and heart. I got up to get into bed and saw that blood was coming from the places where I had the pain. I covered them as well as I could and then, helped by my guardian angel, got into bed.

The following is an abridged description of Gemma's stigmata written by Venerable Fr. Germanus C.P., which agrees with the testimony given by all witnesses who gave evidence in the Process of Gemma's canonization:

"Scarcely had the ecstasy begun when there appeared on the back of both hands and in the middle of the palms a reddish mark, and then one saw under the epidermis a rent being made little by little in the flesh on the backs of the hands and irregularly round in the palms. A little later the skin itself broke and the opening took on all the characteristics of a fresh wound-about a centimeter in diameter in the palms and two millimeters in diameter and twenty millimetres in length on the back of the hands. Sometimes the laceration appeared to be only on the surface; at other times it was almost imperceptible to the naked eye. As a rule, however, it was very deep and seemed that it would pass through the hand and that the upper and lower wounds would meet. One could not make certain of this latter appearance because the apertures were filled with blood, in part congealed but for the most part freely flowing, and when the blood stopped, they closed quickly; being in ecstasy the violence of the pain caused her hands to be convulsively closed. The wound in the palm became covered with a hard fleshy protuberance in the form of the head of a nail, raised and not adhering, about the size of a penny (soldo). In the feet, the wounds were wider and surrounded towards the edges with livid flesh, and the difference in size was the opposite to the wounds in the hands, the wound on the top of the left foot being bigger than that of the sole of the right foot. The aperture of the wound in the side was in the form of a crescent lying on its back with the two points turned upwards. Its length in a straight line was six centimetres and its width in the middle, three millimeters, forming with its two opposite sides an angle half a centimeter in length from top to bottom. The blood that came from the aforesaid wound was copious, as could be seen from her under-garments, which were soaked with it. She did her best to hide this fact and made use of several folds of linen, which' she applied to her side repeatedly, but in a short time they were blood-soaked. She would then hide them in order to wash them herself later on in secret. The Friday ecstasy ceasing, the flow of blood from the side also ceased, and the raw flesh on the hands and feet began to dry up, the mass of lacerated tissues drawing in and becoming firmer little by little. On the following day or on Sunday at the latest, not a trace of those deep wounds remained, neither in the centre nor at the sides, the flesh on top becoming quite natural and quite similar to that of the parts that had not been torn. A white mark alone remained to show that on the previous day there had been raw wounds in those places, which at the end of five days would open again as before, and close again in the same manner. Two years after the phenomena of the stigmata had ceased, at the time of her death, the aforesaid marks still remained and could easily be observed on her body, particularly on her feet, which when she was alive and in ecstasy had been very difficult to uncover."

Gemma's foster Mother, Cecilia Giannini, reacted to Gemma's stigmata as follows in the testimony given by Fr. Germano C.P.:

The first time that the painful phenomenon became known, the pious benefactress in whose house Gemma lived [Ms.Cecilia Giannini], not knowing what to think of it, wished to try and cure one of the wounds by bandaging it, etc. The result was that the next day all the others were perfectly healed and covered with the usual crust, while that one only remained open and went through the ordinary course before it closed and healed, not without causing the poor child much suffer­ing. Now, let our disbelieving Professors explain these most singular facts by their miserable theories of hypnotism, imagination, and religious preoccupation.

The physician Pietro Pfanner opinionated that the marks of Gemma's stigmata were signs of hysterical behaviour, and he suspected Gemma may have suffered from a form of neurosis. Pfanner examined Galgani and noted spots of blood on the palms of her hands, but when he ordered the blood be wiped off with a wet towel, there was no wound. He concluded the phenomenon to be self-inflicted. Psychologist Donovan Rawcliffe claimed that Galgani's stigmata were "self-inflicted wounds of a major hysteric".

Reception

Gemma Galgani, published in 1916

Galgani was well-known in the vicinity of Lucca before her death, especially to those in poverty. Opinions of her were divided: some admired her extraordinary virtues and called her as “the virgin of Lucca” out of pious respect and admiration, while others mocked her. These included her younger sister, Angelina, who would make fun of Galgani during such experiences.

Death, canonization and veneration

In early 1903, Galgani was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and went into a long and often painful decline accompanied by several mystical phenomena. One of the religious nursing sisters who attended to her stated,

We have cared for a good many sick people, but we have never seen anything like this.

At the beginning of Holy Week 1903, her health quickly deteriorated, and by Good Friday she was suffering tremendously, eventually dying in a small room across from the Giannini house on 11 April 1903, Holy Saturday.

Santa Gemma Galgani a Monte Sacro, a church in Rome.

After a thorough examination of her life by the Church, Galgani was beatified on 14 May 1933 and canonized on 2 May 1940. Galgani's relics are housed at the Sanctuary of Santa Gemma associated with the Passionist monastery in Lucca, Italy. Her bronze effigy atop her tomb was crafted by sculptor Francesco Nagni. In 1985, her heart was enshrined in the Santuario de Santa Gema in Madrid, Spain. Gemma Galgani's confessor, Germano Ruoppolo, produced her biography.

References

Bibliography

• Rudoph M. Bell; Cristina Mazzoni (2003). The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint. Chicago, IL, US: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-04196-4.
• Robert A. Orsi (2005): "Two Aspects of One Life" in Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton University Press, p. 110–145.
• Hervé Roullet (2019). Gemma Galgani. Paris, France: Roullet Hervé. ISBN 978-2956313731.

External links

• "Monastery of St Gemma Galgani in Lucca, Italy".
• "Saint Gemma Galgani: mystic of the Redemption". Invisible Monastery of charity and fraternity – Christian family prayer. Archived from the original on 1 January 2008.
• "Works by or about saint Gemma Galgani". archive.org.