St. Gemma Galgani

Who they were

Gemma was the daughter of a pharmacist in Lucca, orphaned by tuberculosis on both sides and left in poverty, keeping house for a family that took her in. Spinal tuberculosis curved and racked her body through her late teens; an apparently complete recovery in 1899, which she attributed to the intercession of St. Gabriel Possenti, is part of her story. So are the experiences that made her famous and doubted in equal measure: from 1899 she reported recurring stigmata, examined and argued over ever since. Every convent she applied to refused her, too sick, too strange. She died of tuberculosis at twenty-five, on Holy Saturday, and was canonized in 1940. The page should carry both truths: the phenomena are contested territory, and the girl underneath them, poor, orphaned, in pain, turned away everywhere, and serene, is not.

Why people turn to St. Gemma Galgani

The spine. People with chronic back pain, scoliosis, and spinal disease ask for the prayers of someone whose vertebrae were the site of her suffering. Students have her from her own interrupted schooling; pharmacists from her father's shop.

How to ask their intercession

Chronic pain is a long conversation, not a single request, a daily decade, offered with her, fits it better than a novena sprint. ---