Gemma Galgani was born near Lucca in Tuscany, Italy, on 12 March 1878 and died on 11 April 1903 at the age of just 25 years from tuberculosis. She was a visionary who claimed to have seen and spoken with Our Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary and her guardian angel, among others, and she also bore the stigmata – the wounds of Christ. She was canonised in 1940 and is now invoked as a patron saint of students and pharmacists.
St Gemma was the fifth of eight children born to Aurelia and Enrico Galgani, a successful pharmacist. When she was a toddler she was placed in a private nursery because her mother had contracted tuberculosis, a disease which claimed her life when Gemma was eight years old.
Considered to be a highly-intelligent child she was sent to a Catholic half-boarding school in Lucca run by the Sisters of St Zita, and was an excellent student with flair for French, Maths and Music. By nature she was quiet and reserved but always cheerful.
St Gemma made her First Holy Communion at the age of nine and, with a profound love for the poor, she expressed a strong desire to join the Passionists, but was prevented by her continuous ill health.
Her father died when she was 18 years old and she became responsible for the care of her younger siblings. She turned down two marriage proposals, opting instead to become a housekeeper with the Giannini family. At the age of 20 Gemma developed spinal meningitis but was healed after she prayed for the intercession of Gabriel Possenti, now a Passionist saint, and St Margaret Mary Alacoque, the 17th century French nun who received the private revelations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
A year later St Gemma began to show signs of the stigma following an interior warning that some unusual grace would be granted to her. Each Thursday evening she would fall into an ecstasy and the bloody marks would appear, remaining until Friday afternoon or Saturday morning when the bleeding would stop and the wounds would close, with only white marks on the place where they had been. Sometimes her body bore the marks of Christ’s scourging at the pillar. She would go into visionary trances in which she would be heard conversing with the figures she saw in her visions. Blasphemous language would cause her to sweat blood. The stigmata ceased after her spiritual director, the Venerable Germano Ruoppolo, worried about her worsening health, forbade her to accept it and St Gemma prayed that she would be spared, but the white marks remained until her death.
The saint said that she resisted the attacks of the Devil often. Indeed, if her mystical experiences “seemed to show some sort of divine possession”, Butler’s Lives of the Saints tells us, “she also showed more alarming symptoms of diabolic possession, which once caused her to spit on a crucifix”.
Fr Germano, a Passionist, was inclined to accept a divine cause but Bishop Giovanni Volpi, her confessor, said publicly that not of her mystical experiences could be said to have come from God. Suggestions that her experiences might rather have been symptomatic of “chronic hysteria” have been contradicted, however, by the contents of the 230 letters she wrote to Fr Germano and Bishop Volpi, because they reveal her not only to be a level-headed and “perfectly balanced” individual but also humble, devout, “constantly aware of the presence of God”, willing to suffer anything in the imitation of the Passion of Jesus Christ, and offering up her agonies as penance and sacrifice. She was said to have left an impression of saintliness on all who encountered her, and was never suspected of duplicity or artfulness by anyone who knew her well.
St Gemma was diagnosed with tuberculosis in early 1903. She rapidly deteriorated at the start of Holy Week, suffered grievously on Good Friday and she died in Lucca on Easter Saturday with “a smile which remained upon her lips”.
Fr Germano became completely convinced of the authenticity of her experiences and he wrote a detailed biography of her life, collecting all her writings, diary, autobiography and letters. St Gemma was beatified in 1933 and canonised on 2 May 1940, by the Venerable Pope Pius XII, just 37 years after her death. Her relics are housed in the Passionist monastery in Lucca.