St. Gemma Galgani & The Agony in the Garden
The Sorrowful Mysteries with the Saints
Note: This is a companion piece to my video series, please check out the YouTube video here or on my Spotify.
Lovers of God,
What better way to spend our Lent than to descend into Sheol with Christ!
Over the next few weeks, we will explore Our Lord’s Sorrowful Mysteries and unite them with the lives and lessons of His Most Holy Saints.
We will begin this series by reflecting on Christ’s Agony in the Garden and tying it to the story of the incredible mystic and Lover of God, St. Gemma Galgani, a young woman who certainly went to her own hell and found that the Good God reigns there, too.
The Mystery: Christ’s Agony in the Garden
Christ’s Agony in the Garden was St. Teresa of Avila's favorite mystery, and it remains one of the most gripping and emotional scenes in scripture. Here, we see the Son of God so overcome with anxiety, fear, and dread that He sweats blood.
This scene is so jarring as it is the only scene in Christ’s passion in which His wounds were purely mental and emotional. This event involves no physical torment, no torture, no scourging or beatings. And yet, Our Lord’s mental anxiety was so severe that he cried out, wept, and blood pushed out from his very pores.
Though there is perhaps the most satiating spiritual fruit of Christ’s Agony - Jesus knew all would be well. He knew he would resurrect. He knew that God was with Him.
And yet - despite this, He was so anxious and terrified that He sweated blood and begged God to send forth an angel to console Him.
Oh, how relatable is this, Lovers of God?
How often have you known that all would be okay?
That you would be fine?
That God is guiding you?
And yet - you still cried. You still felt despair.
You were still so very sick with pain, anxiety, and terror.
Though we can take refuge in Christ’s Agony. Because we, too, can resurrect following our own dark nights of the soul. We, too, can descend into hell and see that Christ reigns there.
And we, too, can call out to God and ask for an angel to console us.
And there is one saint who, in the throws of illness and pain, often called out to her Holy Guardian Angel, who would swiftly appear and guide her back into God’s peace.
This saint is St. Gemma Galgani.
But before we tell the tales of this incredible saint and mystic, let us briefly explore Guardian Angels and their roles in our lives.
Our Most Holy Guardian Angels
Angelology is a fascinating area of Catholic thought, ripe with theological opinion and creativity.
For instance, the Church has not defined angels much " officially.”
Even thoughts on the hierarchy and orders of angels are based on theological opinions (though very much mainstream). However, the Church formally teaches that we are all assigned a Holy Guardian Angel at birth; it can affirm this with certainty, given its scriptural basis.
Psalm 91 speaks of God setting an angel over us. In Matthew 18:10, Jesus Himself mentions having angels that watch over us, and St. Paul repeats this in his letter to the Romans. You can even suggest that St. Raphael serves as the Guardian Angel of Tobias in the Book of Tobit.
Since the earliest days of the Church, we have had a sincere devotion and adoration for our celestial protectors. However, it never quite stuck in the West as much as it has in the East. For instance, in the West, Guardian Angel devotion has basically been reduced to a sing-song nursery rhyming prayer. Some have even foolishly called it a “child’s devotion.”
Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have kept this tradition alive and powerful, incorporating more pleas of angelic protection into their daily prayers and displaying Holy Guardian icons throughout their homes.
In all fairness, Westerners often invoke our Holy Guardian Angels in the Divine Office (especially during Compline), and many of our saints have told us to remember our Holy Guardian, but it’s fallen a bit by the wayside.
Calling out to our Holy Guardian isn’t only recommended; it’s scriptural! Our role as Catholics is to mirror Christ, and what better way to mirror Our Lord than to call out to our Holy Guardian when we are suffering in our own Garden?
St. Gemma Galgani & Her Most Holy Guardian
St. Gemma Galgani (1873-1903) is a fairly modern mystic and stigmatist. I’ve covered her numerous times on my podcast, St. Anthony’s Tongue. She was born in Lucca, Italy, and after being orphaned, she was cared for by Passionist nuns.
From a young age, she had an intimately close relationship with God, the Blessed Virgin, and His saints. However, her spirituality really took off after she suffered from a life-threatening case of spinal meningitis. Though her patron saint, St. Gabriel of the Sorrowful Mother, appeared to her and told her to pray a novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It was through this novena she was cured.
However, the meningitis did wreak havoc on her nervous system, which would lead to debilitating bouts of illness that would plague her for the rest of her life. And it was during these painful episodes that she asked God to be a victim soul.
To summarize, a victim soul is anyone who asks God to use their constant suffering as a prayer to forgive the sins of others. Often, this is joined with an existing illness, such as St. Gemma or, more recently, Mother Angelica. Other times, the victim soul will pray for new pain and suffering—this is less common and perhaps a bit too hardcore for modern sensibilities, but there is a history of against inviting new hardships as a fuel to suffer for others.
In offering their pain to God, the victim soul mirrors the suffering of Christ on the cross.
Another good example of victim soulhood is St. Therese of Lisieux. When Therese was suffering from tuberculosis, she felt so very distant from God. However, she soon realized that the distance from God that she thought must be pretty similar to how atheists feel. So, then Therese asked God to let her trade places with the atheists. She asked God to let her suffer even more, and may her suffering be a prayer to save the souls of those atheists away from Him.
St. Gemma would take on a similar victim soul hood as Therese. She’d often offer her bouts of pain and agony to the souls in purgatory, priests, or the sick in her own community. St. Gemma would eventually receive the stigmata, which is a supercharged form of victim soulhood, as she can now offer the same pains of Christ to all souls away from the Father.
However, it was in these bouts of pain and illness that she grew closer to her Holy Guardian Angel.
St. Gemma’s spiritual director, Fr. Germano, once noted:
“Gemma saw her guardian angel with her own eyes, touched him with her hand, as if he were a being of this world, and would talk to him like one friend to another.
She once said, “Jesus has not left me alone; He makes my guardian angel stay with me always.”
In her diary, St. Gemma would say the following about her first few experiences with her Holy Guardian:
“One evening, when I was suffering more than usual, I was complaining to Jesus and telling him that I would not have prayed so much if I had known that He was not going to cure me, and I asked Him why I had to be sick this way. My angel answered me as follows: ‘If Jesus afflicts you in your body, it is always to purify you in your soul. Be good.’ Oh, how many times during my long illness did I not experience such consoling words in my heart! But I never profited by them.”
From the moment I got up from my sick bed (was cured) my guardian angel began to be my master and guide. He corrected me every time I did something wrong, and he taught me to speak but little, and only when I was spoken to.
One day, when those in the house were speaking of some person and were not speaking very well of her, I wanted to speak up, but the angel gave me a severe rebuke.
He taught me to keep my eyes cast down, and one time in Church he reproved me strongly saying to me:
‘Is this the way you conduct yourself in the presence of God?’
And another time, he admonished me in this way: ‘If you are not good, I will not let you see me anymore’. He taught me many times how to act in the presence of God; that is, to adore Him in His infinite goodness, His infinite majesty, His mercy and in all His attributes”
One of my favorite pieces of St. Gemma’s diary is the evolution of her relationship with her Guardian Angel. The above quote shows a spiritual being correcting and reproaching St. Gemma.
However, as the diary goes on and St. Gemma becomes more structured in her prayer life, the angel becomes much more gentle and nurturing.
There are various stories about the devil attacking St. Gemma. He would appear as a black dog, a shadowy figure, or even a small grotesque troll. Though, Gemma would simply call for her Guardian Angel, who would appear and shoo the devil away.
Another fantastic anecdote is St. Gemma’s “angelic deliveries”.
She’d often write letters to her spiritual director, Fr. Germano, but wouldn’t have enough money for stamps. So she’d leave them in a small manger shrine - and her Guardian Angel would deliver them. The letters would then mysteriously appear on Fr. Germano’s desk despite being hundreds of miles away in Rome.
However, St. Gemma and her angel's most significant spiritual fruits arise subtly throughout her diary. For instance, one night, she was so confident that she had sinned so much that God no longer would hear her prayers.
At that moment, her angel appeared and told her to be easier on herself, reminding Gemma how much God loved her. Or the times when she was thrashing in bed due to her illness and giving up hope in life and even faith in God. In those moments, she’d call out to her angel, who would appear and simply hold her hand or anoint her head with oil.
In these small and tender moments, St. Gemma best mirrored Christ. For as Jesus was agonizing in the Garden, feeling pain, sorrow, and dread, he called out for an angel—and St. Gemma, in her own Garden of agony, would do the same.
It is very easy to become jealous of the supernatural feats of the mystics - bilocation, visions, perhaps even flying. However, this gift of St. Gemma’s is one that we all have. We all have an angel appointed to us, and we can all reach out to them on our darkest nights.
Therefore, as we reflect upon Christ’s Agony in the Garden and the life of St. Gemma Galgani, may we remember that we are divinely protected and loved and that when we sit in our own Garden of despair, may we mirror Our Lord and cry out for Holy Guardian to console us and to guide us.
May Our Holy Guardians pray for us.
May St. Gemma Galgani pray for us.
In Cor Jesu,
W.
For More on St. Gemma, please check out my video series on the saints and the sorrowful mysteries on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
