BIOGRAPHY of ST GEMMA GALGANI - Get a Free Blog

comfort.
‘ "The demons with My permission will make continual efforts to overcome your soul. They will put evil
thoughts into your mind, and give you a great distaste for prayer, and you will never be without many terrors
and fears. You will suffer outrages and injuries; no one will believe in you any longer. You will receive no
comfort from anyone, not even from your superiors. On the contrary everyone will mortify you, and you will
be greatly confused. What will pain you most will be that Heaven will seem deaf to your pleadings. Jesus will
seem to you to be so severe. You will find it difficult to pray. When you will seek Jesus you will not find Him;
to you it will seem that He casts you from Him and departs from you. You will desire to be recollected and
instead you will be distracted. You will call upon the Blessed Virgin and the saints, but no one will have pity
on you and it will seem that you have been abandoned by all. When you receive Holy Communion or go to
confession, you will feel no fervor; these things will be wearisome to you. You will go through your
accustomed exercises of devotion as it were through mere routine, and you will think it merely time lost.
Nevertheless you will believe, but as if you did not believe; you will hope, but as if you no longer had hope;
you will love Jesus, but as if you did not love Him, because during all this time you will be without feeling.
Furthermore, you will grow tired of life and yet be afraid of death; you will not be able to find refuge even in
tears."
‘When I was about to finish the Holy Hour, Jesus said to me that He was going to treat me as His heavenly
Father had treated Him." [Life of Gemma Galgani, by Father Germanus, C.P (Sands, London.)]
What a terrifying picture! A soul less heroic than Gemma's would have been utterly dismayed. From now on,
however, she had but one desire-to suffer, for did' not suffering make her more like Jesus? 'Jesus is the Man
of Sorrows,' she said, ‘and I desire to become the daughter of sorrows.'
SEE WHAT JESUS HAS DONE TO ME
The morning after the extraordinary ecstasy in which she received the Stigmata, Gemma was in a quandary.
Holy souls are profoundly humble, indeed humility is at the root of their sanctity. God bestows His gifts upon
the humble because they know how to keep jealously hidden the secrets of the King.
Her wounds were still bleeding. The phenomena did not cease until three o'clock in the afternoon of the
Feast of the Sacred Heart. It was repeated unfailingly every week from about eight o'clock on Thursday
evening until three o'clock in the afternoon of the following day. This lasted until February, 1901, when it
ceased by a command of obedience. How was she to hide that bleeding? She must go out to Holy
Communion. She procured a pair of gloves, as she said, ' in order to hide my hands.' Her feet were also
paining her and she could scarcely stand up. It seemed to her that at every step she was going to die.
Nevertheless she was able to go to Church and receive Holy Communion. How fervent must have been her
Communion the day after she received that extraordinary favour. More truly than ever Gemma could say:
'Now I no longer live but Christ liveth in me.'
After Holy Communion the blood continued to flow, and she realized that she must tell someone about it, but
she did not know what to say. She thought that such graces were usually conferred upon those who had
consecrated themselves to God, and began timidly to ask various people whether they had certain wounds
and what was usually done under the circumstances. She found no one who understood what she meant,
her inquiries being met with pitying smiles. What then was she to do? Arriving home she opened her mantle
and stretching out her hands towards her aunt she said with candor and simplicity: ' Aunt, see what Jesus
has done to me !' Her aunt was amazed, but did not understand the meaning of this strange phenomenon.
The following description of Gemma's stigmata. It is an abridgement of the account written by Father
Germanus. His description agrees with that of all the other witnesses who gave evidence in the Processes,
and it is given because, as the spiritual director and the first biographer of Gemma, he includes all the
stigmata, whereas the other witnesses spoke of one or other manifestation of the phenomena.
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
inside-s-oblong 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.
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