But Renata, unlike Cecilia Cony, outraged her Angel, Maniel, when, attaining puberty, she asked him in all innocence to make love with her. The Angel left her promising at any rate to come back in human form when the time came. After that Renata, become a woman, never ceased to search for him and tried to discern in every man the presence of her Angel. This was a novel based on the relationship between the terrestrial and celestial worlds, where Angels, demons and humans are intermixed in a perpetual fight for souls, a perfect setting for Gemma Galgani. She spent her (short) life swimming in the supernatural as others did in music. Angels and demons waged daily battle for the soul of that young and magnificent virgin. We can understand that. I know some who would not hesitate for a second to confront Satan himself for her beautiful eyes.

      Gemma Galgani's life is a synopsis of this permanent combat, of every soul's tribulations. Only with her, it was carried to extremes. A predestined soul, Gemma accepted her mission very early without really understanding what it was. But from the end of her adolescence she wanted to become a Passionist nun. And as usual, when she was twenty a paralysis of the legs--Pott's Disease--immobilised her. As if this were not enough, she was then felled by a tumor in her head coupled with a purulent ear infection.

      The doctors operated on her several times, but, unable to cure her, finally decided to give up on her, decreeing that science could not save her from a quick death. Gemma did not give up hope. Her spiritual life was already prodigious and, bedridden, she started upon a novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. The morning of the ninth day, she inexplicably recovered from all her ills. It was Friday, March 3, 1899. From that day on, much more grateful to Christ than to the doctors, Gemma regularly observed the holy hour, a habit which bore her toward constant devotion to Christ. And while praying before her crucifix on a Friday in March, 1901, she felt the flagellation of her flesh, like all stigmatics (cf. the movie "STIGMATA"). Her adoptive mother found her lying on the ground, her back bloody and striped by the marks of a lash. Thenceforth Gemma Galgani would relive Christ's Passion every Thursday from 10:00 p.m. to Friday at 3:00 p.m.

      Theologians have a tendency to compare the saints among themselves and discuss their merits and respective powers (a little like sports cars), and we cannot help noting the marked similarities between Gemma Galgani (a Ferrari...of course) and Theresa of Lisieux. Both of them, with a simplicity and a candor that would make a hangman cry, scaled the steps of Saint Peter's of Rome at lightning speed: Gemma died at the age of twenty-five and Theresa at twenty-four (when Gemma was nineteen). The Carmelite did not bear the signature of Christ, but Gemma, although a laywoman, participated of her own will in the Passion, the open door to the most amazing graces. Other than levitation and communication at a distance, Gemma Galgani could also "see" her guardian Angel and talked regularly with him during her lifetime.

      Some consider Gemma Galgani a minor mystic, doubtless because she "saw nothing" like Hildegarde von Bingen and because she was neither a gifted tertiary Dominican, nor a Carmelite in ecstasy, nor a troubled Franciscan, but simply a stigmatic laywoman. Yet in her memoirs we find passages that inevitably make us think of the more than disconcerting ecstasies of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, of Angela de Foligno or of Maria-Magdalena dei Pazzi. Even though a laywoman, this splendid virgin was canonized only thirty-seven years after her death. Because of various supernatural signs and inexplicable healings, Rome became interested in her case in 1917 and she was proclaimed a saint on March 26, 1936.

      Since then, her face continues to fascinate multitudes, a bit like the enigmatic Great Garbo's.

From the book "An inquiry into the existence of guardian angels".