St. Gemma Galgani

Gemma Galgani is one of the most unusual of the modern saints: a young Italian woman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century whose spiritual life combined intense suffering, mystical gifts including the stigmata, and the kind of interior trials that make hagiographers uneasy. The unusual phenomena — the stigmata, the visions, the ecstasies, the accounts of encounters with her guardian angel and with demonic forces — should not be suppressed, but neither should they dominate the picture in a way that would distort it. The harder fact is the suffering: Gemma was chronically ill, lost her mother early, was refused entry to the Passionist order she wanted to join, lived in someone else's household at Lucca, and bore the stigmata with considerable physical pain every week from 1899 until a year before her death.

She was directed by her spiritual directors to write an autobiography, and those pages are at once extraordinarily intimate and occasionally difficult to assess. The relevant principle of mystical theology is straightforward: unusual gifts of this kind are never the substance of holiness; they are sometimes accompaniments of it. What constitutes Gemma's holiness is the union of her will with God through suffering willingly borne — not the experiences themselves but the consent behind them. She died of tuberculosis at twenty-five in 1903. The investigation of her cause moved carefully given the unusual phenomena, but the holiness itself was not in serious doubt. She was beatified in 1933 and canonized in 1940.