Mother to her siblings
St Gemma Galgani was born on March 12, 1878 in a small Italian town near Lucca in Tuscany.
Her mother died when she was a child. After her father died, when she was 19, she effectively became a mother to her seven siblings. She was also devoted to the poor.
Gemma contracted meningitis, but thanks to the intercession of St Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows (Francesco Possenti), she was
miraculously cured.
She wanted to enter religious life but wasn’t in good enough health. She offered this disappointment to Jesus as a sacrifice.
In 1899 she had a premonition that a special grace would be granted to her. She experienced pain in her hands and feet, along with bleeding. These were marks of the stigmata.
Stigmata gashes
Every Thursday evening, Gemma would fall into rapture and the marks would appear. The stigmata would remain until Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, when the deep gashes would be replaced by white marks.
Three years before she died her confessor forbade Gemma to accept the stigmata. Through her prayers the phenomenon eventually ended, although the white marks remained.
With the support of her confessor, Gemma went to live with a family named Gianni where she was allowed to live her spiritual life with more freedom. She had many ecstasies and the words she spoke during them were recorded by her confessor. Gemma often saw her guardian angel.
During the apostolic investigations into her life, witnesses said that most of Gemma’s sacrifices and penances were hidden from view.
Dying with a smile
In January 1903, Gemma was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died aged 25, quietly, with her parish priest beside her. He reported: “She died with a smile which remained upon her lips, so that I could not convince myself that she was really dead.” She was beatified in 1933 and canonised in May 1940.
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