Saint Gemma Galgani

Gemma Galgani was born in Camigliano, near Lucca, on March 12, 1878, and died at twenty-five. In those twenty-five years, more or less everything happened to her. She lost her mother at seven. She grew up with her father and siblings in Lucca, went to school with the Oblate Sisters of the Holy Spirit, and then the family went bankrupt: they lost everything and ended up in a poor house on Via del Biscione — which today is called Via Santa Gemma Galgani. Her father died, and she was left to look after her younger siblings. It was in those years that the phenomena began that people would argue about for a century. Gemma said she had received the stigmata, and spoke of visions and ecstasies. The city’s convents didn’t want her: she was poor and sick, and those stories made people uneasy. She was taken in by the wealthy Giannini family, who gave her room and board in their own home for about four years. She was guided by Monsignor Volpi, her confessor, and by the Passionist Germano Ruoppolo, who wrote her first biography. She felt deeply bound to the Passionists, and never became one of them: they wouldn’t accept her because she was too ill. She died in Lucca on April 11, 1903, of tuberculosis. Pius XI beatified her in 1933, and Pius XII proclaimed her a saint in 1940 — thirty-seven years after her death, a very short time for such a debated story. If your name is Gemma, today is your name day.